Flight Instructor Program · policy
Ticket: 20. Remediation visibility rule and trigger threshold
Story: US-5.7. Carrier of parameter P4
Gate: Phase 2 for the rule, Enrollment for the disclosure Written so the enrollment project can lift it into the packet unchanged
Issued: 2026-08-13
Falling short of a lesson's completion standard does not stop you starting the next lesson.
This is Decision 9 and it is the design choice this whole page hangs off. Extra work is interleaved with teaching lessons rather than blocking entry to them. If your steep turns are rusty at lesson 28, you get extra work on steep turns and you also start lesson 29.
Why it is built this way. A high-time candidate whose commercial maneuvers have decayed is the most common person to need extra work here, and blocking their progress would stall the whole program over a skill that comes back with practice. It would also make the bill arrive as one unexplained lump at the end. Interleaving keeps the program moving and keeps the cost legible.
The one thing that is gated is the practical test recommendation, which requires every applicable ACS area at PROFICIENT. That is US-8.1 and it is a gate at the end, not gates throughout.
Small amounts of extra work are normal, expected, and not recorded as a separate item. An extra ten minutes on a maneuver, a second attempt at a teaching block, a repeated explanation: that is instruction, not remediation, and treating it as a recordable event would make the record useless and the candidate anxious.
Absorbed means: it happens inside the lesson, it is not a separate line, and it is not a conversation.
Absorbed stops and visible starts when either of these is crossed. They are independent. Either one triggers.
The third attempt at the same lesson. Not the second.
A second attempt is ordinary. Weather, a bad day, a skill that needed one more go. A third attempt means something is not working, and the thing that is not working may be the teaching rather than the candidate.
Parameter P4 is 20 percent.
Measured as cumulative hours flown and ground hours delivered against the cumulative planned hours for the lessons completed to date, from program/PROGRAM-STRUCTURE.md.
Worked, so the arithmetic is not in doubt. The program plan is 44.4 ground hours and 26.0 dual hours, 70.4 total, after lesson 40 moved to 4.0 ground on 2026-08-14. A candidate who has completed through lesson 24 has a planned cumulative of 26.0 ground and 4.5 dual, 30.5 total. Trigger B fires for them at 36.6 total hours, which is 30.5 plus 20 percent.
It is cumulative and checked at each lesson, not applied once at the end. A candidate can cross it at lesson 14 and it fires at lesson 14.
Why 20 percent. Below about 15 percent the trigger fires on ordinary variation between candidates and stops meaning anything. Above about 25 percent, a candidate on the slow side has already spent a substantial amount before anyone has the conversation, which is the outcome objective O6 exists to prevent. Twenty percent is far enough out to be a signal and close enough in that the conversation is still useful.
Expressed in the terms the enrollment project's estimate uses, which is hours against the lesson set in program/PROGRAM-STRUCTURE.md. The two are comparable because they are the same number. The enrollment project turns hours into a cost range using the school's hourly rates; this document deals only in hours, because per Decision 15 no cost figure appears in this project.
The separate record is what makes both cost and progress honest. It is also what lets a candidate see, at the end, that they spent six extra hours on ground reference maneuvers and nothing else, which is a much better conversation than an unexplained total.
Your Supervising Instructor, within one lesson of the trigger firing. Not at the end of the phase, and not by message.
It covers four things, and it takes about ten minutes:
If the trigger fires again after the conversation, Erick joins the next one. Two triggers on the same skill means the plan for that skill is not working.
"Over plan" is measured against the planned hours in program/PROGRAM-STRUCTURE.md. That part is settled and needs nothing external.
The starting-point baseline is not. US-5.7 depends on interface 1, the enrollment project's US-1.5 evaluation flight proficiency snapshot, which is what tells you where a candidate started. That contract is unwritten. Without it there is no recorded baseline distinguishing a candidate who arrived rusty from one who has stopped progressing.
The assumption used in the meantime, stated rather than left implicit: in the absence of a US-1.5 snapshot, the baseline is taken as the planned hours themselves, meaning every candidate is assumed to start at the program's assumed entry standard.
What that assumption costs, named honestly. It is unfair to the P3 second-career candidate. A candidate arriving with genuinely decayed commercial maneuvers will cross trigger B earlier than one arriving current, and without a snapshot the record cannot show that the extra hours were predictable at enrollment rather than a sign of trouble. The conversation should acknowledge this directly where it applies, and the instructor should record the candidate's entry condition in their own words at lesson 10, which is the first flight and the earliest honest observation point available.
This is a gap, not a workaround. The US-1.5 contract is on the board as an item needing an owner on both sides.
This section is what the enrollment project lifts into the packet. It is stated in writing before you pay, per US-5.7 and objective O6.
Extra work, and what it costs you
This program has no proficiency gate. If a skill needs more work, you get more work on it and you keep moving through the lessons. Nothing is held back.
Small amounts of extra work are part of instruction and are not charged or recorded separately.
Two things turn extra work into a separate, visible item with its own hours:
- Attempting the same lesson a third time.
- Reaching 20 percent over the planned cumulative hours for the lessons you have completed.
When either happens, your instructor talks to you about it within one lesson. You will be told what triggered it, what the extra work is for, and roughly what it is expected to take. Extra work is then tracked separately from your program lessons so that you can see exactly what it is costing you and why.
You will not find out about this by crossing it. You are being told now.
