One thing I think is really important is that just because you’re a good pilot, it doesn’t automatically make you a good instructor. A lot of SIV instructors come from flying. They might be very good pilots, they might fly acro and they might have a huge amount of experience, but very few have actually studied the art of teaching. For me, that’s a completely different skill.
Teaching isn’t just about knowing the right control inputs. It’s understanding the psychology behind learning, understanding how people respond to fear and making sure you don’t create new mental barriers while you’re trying to build technical skills. You can be a really good instructor without being the best pilot in the world, and equally you can be an exceptional pilot who struggles to teach. For SIV, though, I think you need both. You need to understand the wing, but you also need to understand the person underneath it.
You need to recognise when someone is ready to move on, when they’re overloaded, when they’re carrying fear from a previous experience and when they simply need more time to build confidence. Instruction is an art, and I don’t think enough people talk about that.
When I first came into SIV, I thought I was a good enough pilot to teach it. Looking back, I knew enough about wing control, but I wasn’t a good instructor. The biggest turning point for me was spending a year shadowing Fabien. I sat on the boat, watched every course and asked questions constantly. What made the biggest difference was that he never simply gave me the answers.
Instead of saying,
The other thing that accelerated my learning was volume. For months we were teaching seven days a week whenever the weather allowed. We only stopped when the conditions were unflyable. It was exhausting, but it meant I saw everything very quickly: every type of pilot, every mistake, every fear and just about everything that can go wrong. There’s no shortcut for that kind of experience.
People often say practice makes perfect, but I think practice only makes perfect if you’re constantly analysing what you’re seeing and learning from it. That’s what those years gave me. They gave me thousands of repetitions, but more importantly they taught me to look beyond the manoeuvre and understand the person flying it.
For me, that’s what makes a good SIV instructor. It’s not just about being able to fly well. It’s about understanding how people learn, how they develop confidence and how to help every pilot progress safely.