External spin module and endorsement capture

What gates the checkride is a completed 61.183(i) endorsement in the candidate's logbook. Nothing else. It is an eligibility requirement on the applicant, the examiner checks for it, and a candidate who arrives without it does not take the test that day.

North Aero does not provide spin flight training and does not select, procure, book, or resell an external provider. The candidate obtains their own spin training and their own endorsement.

North Aero assists. It is not on North Aero. The assistance is real and it is defined below so that "we will help" is a set of specific acts rather than a sentiment: the candidate is told at enrollment that this is theirs to arrange, told again at lesson 7 to start, taught the ground half in lesson 31, given the questions to ask a provider, given the checklist of what the endorsement must contain, checked at three points, and verified and captured when it lands.

What this means for planning. North Aero cannot slip on a vendor it does not engage. The risk moves onto the candidate's side of the line, and North Aero's job becomes making sure the candidate knows that early enough to act on it, which is the whole of the disclosure and checkpoint machinery below.

US-6.2 as written in CFI_User_Stories.md v0.4 says the candidate wants spin training and the endorsement "arranged for me inside the program", and its first acceptance criterion requires the program to name the external provider, the aircraft they use, their location, and their typical lead time.

That is superseded. North Aero does not arrange it and does not name a provider. The decision is Erick's, made 2026-08-13, and the reasoning is that procuring and standing behind a third party's aerobatic instruction is a commitment North Aero is not making, while the candidate's need is met by disclosure and support rather than by procurement.

~~US-6.2 needs amending, and until it is, the story and this document disagree on a testable condition.~~ Amended 2026-08-14. The disagreement is closed. Cross-cutting practice in this project is that the story wins over a ticket, so the disagreement was recorded here rather than resolved by an artifact quietly outranking a Must story, and it stayed open on SUPERVISOR-TASKS.md until the story itself changed. CFI_User_Stories.md v0.5 carries Decision 42 and the rewritten US-6.2, and the story and this document now say the same thing.

The record of the disagreement is kept rather than deleted, because the reason it was left open for a day is the useful part: an artifact had discovered that a Must story was wrong, and the project's rule is that discovering it does not authorise the artifact to win.

What survives from US-6.2 unchanged, and is satisfied below:

Objective O6 is unaffected and is arguably better served. O6 counts candidates who first learned of a cost driver after enrolling. Under this model the cost driver is disclosed at enrollment as the candidate's own, which is a clearer disclosure than one buried inside a program fee.

Risk R7 changes character. It was "a single external provider with a long lead time slips the checkride on a dependency North Aero does not control." It is now "a candidate leaves their own spin endorsement too late and slips their own checkride." The mitigation is the same instrument, applied earlier: disclosure, a named trigger, and four checkpoints.

61.183(i) requires a flight instructor applicant to hold a logbook endorsement from an authorized instructor certifying that the applicant is competent and instructionally proficient in stall awareness, spin entry, spins, and spin recovery, given after that instructor has provided flight training in those areas in an aircraft certificated for spins.

Three properties of that requirement drive everything below, and each is checked against the live regulation on the day any candidate-facing version of this is issued, per cross-cutting requirement 4 and the currency caveat in sources/FAA-SOURCES.md.

1. It is an endorsement, not a course completion. A receipt, a certificate, or a logbook entry without the endorsement language does not satisfy it. This is the single most likely way a candidate spends the money and still does not have what they need.
2. It covers instructional proficiency, not only the ability to recover a spin. That is why lesson 31 exists and why it comes first.
3. The aircraft must be certificated for spins. This is the one condition whose change would make the training internal.

North Aero does not supply the endorsement wording to the external instructor. They are the authorized instructor making the certification and the words are theirs. What North Aero supplies is the verification checklist below, so that what arrives is checked rather than assumed.

What the endorsement buys on the practical test, and the one case where it does not

Added 2026-08-14 from a live reading of 61.183(i), at title 14 currency 2026-08-12.

61.183(i)(2) requires the applicant to demonstrate instructional proficiency in stall awareness, spin entry, spins, and spin recovery, and then provides that an examiner may accept the (i)(1) endorsement as satisfactory evidence of that proficiency for the practical test.

The carve-out, and it is the part worth knowing. That acceptance does not apply where the practical test is a retest resulting from the applicant having failed a previous test for deficiencies in those areas. In plain terms: the endorsement normally means spins are not flown on the checkride, but a candidate who was disapproved on spin-related areas cannot lean on it the second time.

Two consequences, both of which belong to the candidate rather than to a form.

• Do not teach the endorsement as a way of avoiding spins. A candidate who understands it that way has understood the paperwork and not the requirement, and they will teach a Student the same habit of mind.
• It matters at exactly the worst moment. Ticket 43 covers disapproval and discontinuance, and this is a line that only becomes relevant after an unsatisfactory result, which is when nobody wants to be reading the regulation for the first time. Ticket 43 inherits it from here.

The last row is the one to say out loud at enrollment, not to bury. A candidate who understands at enrollment that this is theirs will start early. A candidate who assumes the school is handling it will discover otherwise in phase 3, which is exactly the scramble US-6.2 was written to prevent, and under this model the only thing that prevents it is having said so clearly and repeatedly.

The questions to ask a provider

Supplied by North Aero because they are the questions a candidate does not know to ask, and asking them is the difference between spending the money once and spending it twice.

1. Will your instructor endorse 61.183(i), including instructional proficiency, not only spin training? Ask this first. A provider offering an upset recovery experience or an introductory spin lesson may not endorse instructional proficiency at all, and the endorsement is the entire point of the exercise.
2. Is the aircraft certificated for intentional spins, in the loading we will fly it in?
3. What is your current lead time from enquiry to flight?
4. How many flights is this normally, and what happens if one is not enough? Competence and instructional proficiency are judgments the endorsing instructor makes, and a provider who guarantees an endorsement in one flight is promising something they cannot.
5. Will the endorsement go in my logbook on the day?
6. What is your cancellation and weather policy? Aerobatic aircraft and weather minima combine badly with a candidate who has travelled.

Ask question 1 before question 3. Lead time is irrelevant from a provider who will not endorse.

The candidate is told to begin arranging it at the phase 1 to phase 2 boundary, on completion of lesson 7. That is parameter P5's trigger, reframed: North Aero triggers the candidate's action, not a booking of its own.

The flight occurs between lesson 31 and the phase 3 to phase 4 boundary. Lesson 31 comes first without exception: US-6.1 requires the ground lesson before the candidate ever spins an airplane, so that the flight confirms understanding rather than creating it.

Four checkpoints rather than one, because under this model North Aero's only instrument is telling the candidate in time. Each of the four is cheap. The last one is not, and by lesson 38 the options have narrowed to whatever the candidate can arrange in weeks.

The eight week lead time is an assumption and stays one

Parameter P5 assumes up to eight weeks. That assumption is unverified and cannot now be verified by North Aero, because North Aero does not engage a provider and therefore has no provider's lead time to measure.

What replaces verification: the candidate finds out and tells us. Question 3 above produces a real lead time for the provider they are actually using, and the lesson 7 checkpoint is where it gets recorded on their file. If it is materially longer than eight weeks for a given candidate, the mitigation is on their side: start sooner, or move lesson 31 earlier within phase 3, which the phase 3 ordering permits because lesson 31 has no flight prerequisite.

program/PROGRAM-STRUCTURE.md is not amended on an assumption. P5's assumption is now labelled as a planning figure for the school's own scheduling rather than a fact about any provider.

The pacing case that still bites, named rather than hidden. On the accelerated scenario, four sessions a week, lessons 8 through 31 take roughly six weeks, which is inside the eight week planning figure. A fast candidate can reach lesson 31 before their own spin slot is available. That is why the trigger is lesson 7 and not phase 3.

The spin training is a separate line item, paid by the candidate directly to the provider, and it is outside North Aero's hourly rates entirely.

• North Aero does not bill it, mark it up, or stand behind it. The candidate contracts with the provider directly.
• Travel to and from the provider is the candidate's time and cost, and may exceed the flight itself.
• It is not included in any figure the candidate is given about North Aero's training. Per Decision 15 and cross-cutting requirement 8, no figure appears in this document at all. Hourly rates come from /RATES.md, which does not exist yet, and the enrollment project produces candidate-facing cost ranges. This item sits outside both.
• More than one flight may be needed, and the candidate should budget for that possibility. The endorsement rests on the external instructor's judgment of competence and instructional proficiency, which is not something a fixed price can promise.

What is disclosed at enrollment is the existence, the ownership, and the structure, not an amount. The candidate learns at enrollment that spin training is required, that North Aero does not provide it, that they arrange and pay for it themselves, that travel may be involved, and that more than one flight is possible. That disclosure is the whole of O6's requirement here, and it does not depend on any provider having been identified.

The endorsing instructor does not work for North Aero, so nothing about this capture happens on its own.

Step 1 is North Aero's most valuable single act in this whole process. A candidate who knows before they fly what the endorsement must say is a candidate who will notice on the day if it does not say it, while the instructor who wrote it is still standing there.

Step 3 exists because of a specific failure. A candidate who leaves without a copy has one paper record of a checkride prerequisite, in a logbook that will be carried in and out of airplanes for months. The scan takes thirty seconds at the provider's counter and cannot be done later.

Step 5 is a human check and it is not delegated to a tool, per cross-cutting requirement 9. The record names the person who checked it and the date they checked it.

The verification checklist

Given to the candidate at step 1 and applied by the Supervising Instructor at step 5, against the live regulation on the day rather than against this list from memory.

• It is an endorsement in the logbook, signed, not a certificate or a receipt
• It names the endorsing instructor, their certificate number, and its expiration date
• It is dated, and the date is the date of the training
• It covers stall awareness, spin entry, spins, and spin recovery
• It certifies instructional proficiency, not only that training was received
• It identifies the aircraft, and the aircraft is one certificated for spins
• The endorsing instructor's certificate was current on the date of the endorsement

If any line fails, it is raised the same day. A defective endorsement is far easier to correct while the candidate and the provider both still remember the flight, and much harder to correct at the checkride desk. This is also the point at which North Aero's assistance is worth the most, and it costs one phone call made early instead of a lost checkride slot later.

Ticket 42 builds the checkride document checklist and this is a line item on it:

Spin training endorsement under 61.183(i), in the logbook, checked and dated by the Supervising Instructor, with a scan in the records file.

Recorded here so ticket 42 inherits it rather than rediscovering it. This line, not a provider booking, is the checkride-gating item, and it is the one that gets tracked.

Per Decision 7, this module is written so that acquiring one converts it to an in-house lesson without a restructure.

What changes: who flies it, where, who pays, and who makes the endorsement. The training becomes school aircraft time at the school's hourly rate rather than a separate line item. Steps 2 and 3 of the capture process collapse into the normal endorsement process, because the endorsing instructor is a Delivery Pool member whose records North Aero already holds. The ownership table above flips: the rows that are the candidate's become North Aero's.

What does not change, and this is the point:

• Lesson 31 is unaffected. It is a North Aero ground lesson today and it stays exactly as it is. Its existence never depended on the aircraft (US-6.1, Decision 7).
• The position in the sequence is unaffected. Ground lesson first, flight between lesson 31 and the phase 3 to 4 boundary.
• The endorsement requirements are unaffected. 61.183(i) does not care who owns the airplane, and the verification checklist is the same list.
• The checkpoints are unaffected. They become easier to satisfy, not unnecessary.
• No lesson is renumbered and no phase boundary moves. The spin flight carries no North Aero lesson number today and would not need one then.

What must be true before that conversion is even considered: the aircraft is certificated for intentional spins in the loading it would be flown in, and a Delivery Pool member is qualified and willing to provide the instruction and make the endorsement. The second is the harder one, and it is the same Delivery Pool constraint as objective O2 and risk R1.

• ✓The checkride-gating item is the completed 61.183(i) endorsement, not a provider selection
• ✓Responsibility is allocated explicitly, line by line, between North Aero and the candidate
• ✓North Aero's assistance is defined as specific acts rather than as a sentiment
• ✓The questions to ask a provider are supplied, with the instructional proficiency question first
• ✓The cost is a separate line item outside North Aero's hourly rates, disclosed at enrollment as structure and ownership rather than as an amount
• ✓The scheduling trigger is named and reframed as triggering the candidate's action (P5)
• ✓The eight week figure is labelled a planning assumption that North Aero can no longer verify, with the mechanism that replaces verification
• ✓A defined process captures the endorsement into the logbook and the records file, with an owner on every step
• ✓The verification checklist is given to the candidate before the flight, not only applied after it
• ✓The Supervising Instructor's check is a human check, named and dated (requirement 9)
• ✓Written so that acquiring an approved aircraft converts this to an in-house lesson without a restructure (Decision 7)
• ✓The endorsement is recorded as a line item for ticket 42's checkride document checklist
• ✓US-6.2's superseded premise and first acceptance criterion were recorded as needing an amendment rather than being silently contradicted, and the story was then amended. CFI_User_Stories.md v0.5, Decision 42, 2026-08-14. The gap between the artifact discovering the problem and the story being changed was one day, and it was visible on the board throughout
• ✓No currency figure anywhere (Decision 15, requirement 8)
• ✓FAA references verified current on the date issued, 2026-08-13