I got mine in 5 hours and I think I can give you some tips. This checkride is unlike anyother you have done, and so is the training. It has almost nothing to do with how you fly, so don’t focus on the flight part of training. Learning to fly from the right seat takes about 1 hour of air work and 30 minutes of landing. After that you should feel just as comfortable flying from the right as you do from the left. By now you can fly a plane and you will not be learning any new maneuvers, so don’t worry about the physical flying aspect.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the focus for the CFI is on your knowledge and judgment. If you have not completed your FOI and CFI written, don’t even attempt to start flying. Both tests are easy, but the FOI is new and you will need to really know it for the checkride. It is all about how people learn and how to effectively teach.

Once those are done, it is now time to really train. Get some private and commercial PTS books and start memorizing every maneuver and their tolerances. After that, grab any instructional material on how to fly the maneuvers. No matter what you use, they will all pretty much tell you how the FAA wants people to fly each maneuver. I used UND’s Podcasts because they gave canned FAA lessons and I could play them in the car. Overtime, I just memorized each podcast. Once you can recite lessons from memory without thinking, you are ready to start flying.

The reason why you should wait until you have these memorized before you start is that when the student/instructor/examiner says they need you to teach the maneuver while you fly it, you will need to fly a good example, search for traffic, and verbally instruct. That is very hard to do if you are trying to focus your mind on the maneuver and the explanation at the same time. Your instructor will then be able to teach you the finer points and traps students/examiners might get you in. Another good (but very boring tool) is the 4 hour King Schools CFI Prep DVD. It goes through the ground and flight test for the CFI and gives you another chance to hear how the FAA likes you to teach lessons.

The CFI is all mental, so if you know your material and can communicate it effectively, you are more than half way there. To really be good, try to remember what it was like for you to learn how to fly and think about the good things and the bad things your instructors did and learn from them. Also, it is no joke; students will try to kill you, so you must be ready all the time. It is not too difficult as long as you remember that.