Pilot qualifications, 14 CFR, and publications

What this lesson is for: being able to work out whether the pilot in front of you is legal to fly today, and being able to teach them to work it out themselves. The skill is finding the answer, not having memorized it.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation III Task A, and Area of Operation II Task J.
• From live eCFR: 61.3, 61.23, 61.56, 61.57, 61.113.
• The AIM's own foreword, on what the AIM is and is not. This is a short read and it matters more than its length suggests.

Deliverable: A one-page checklist you would hand a pilot who has been away from flying for three years, listing what they need to check and where to check it. Cite the section for each item. Do not list what the answers are, because they depend on the person. That distinction is most of the exercise.

Second deliverable. Write the ground lesson you would teach on pilot qualifications, 14 CFR, and publications, to the template in standards/LESSON-PLAN-TEMPLATE.md, in your own words. This is one of your seventeen P3 plans, covering the regulations and publications cluster. Bring it on paper.

The checklist above is what you would hand a pilot. The plan is how you would teach it. They are different documents, and writing both is the point.

1. Certificates and documents required to act as pilot in command.
2. Medical certificate requirements and duration, including BasicMed.
3. The flight review.
4. Recency of experience: passengers, night, instrument.
5. Privileges and limitations of the certificate held.
6. How to find a rule you do not know, in 14 CFR.
7. Publications, and what weight each one carries. A regulation, an AIM entry, an advisory circular, and a handbook are four different kinds of thing.
8. How to tell whether your publication is current.
9. You teach.

• Find three assigned rules in live eCFR, unaided and timed.
• Teach an assigned element to a Simulated Student.
• Work out what a pilot returning after four years off actually needs, from the regulation, with them watching.

1. You find three assigned rules in live eCFR without help, and state the section number for each.
2. You teach an assigned element to the Simulated Student, sending them to a live source rather than asserting from memory.
3. You determine what the returning pilot needs to be legal, correctly, and show the regulation rather than asserting it.
4. You distinguish a regulation from an AIM entry, an advisory circular, and a handbook, and say what weight each carries.
5. You identify one North Aero policy in this subject area that is stricter than the regulation, and say which is which.
6. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

• Reciting currency requirements from memory, confidently, and being slightly wrong. Almost everybody does this. The fix is not to memorize harder.
• Teaching the AIM as though it were regulation. Examiners probe this specifically. So do students, eventually, and being wrong in front of a student costs more.
• Calendar months versus 12 months. Read 61.56 and 61.57 next to each other and notice.
• Treating BasicMed as a lesser thing. It is an alternative path.
• Not knowing where to start looking. 14 CFR has a structure. Learn the structure and you never need the content.
• Believing the returning pilot's account of their own currency. They are not lying to you. They are misremembering, which is more common and harder to catch.

Not applicable. Ground lesson. Your next lesson flies.

This lesson has no Video Slots.