Endorsements and logbook entries

What this lesson is for: writing the endorsements you will need in your first month as an instructor, so that your first solo endorsement is not your first attempt at one.

You will also learn what to do when you get one wrong, which nobody teaches and everybody eventually needs.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation II, Task K.
• From live eCFR: 61.51, 61.87, 61.89, 61.93, 61.189, 61.56.
• Find the FAA's current endorsement guidance yourself. Note where you found it and its date. Do not use a copy somebody gave you, and do not use one out of a commercial binder. Checking currency is half the skill.

Deliverable: Draft, by hand, a pre-solo endorsement and a solo cross-country endorsement for an imaginary student. Bring them, plus the citation for where you got the required content and the date you looked it up. We will check them together.

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

The endorsements above are the artifact. The plan is how you teach a student to check currency rather than to copy a form.

1. Required logbook entries for instruction you give.
2. Pre-solo knowledge test, solo endorsements, and their logbook entries.
3. Other required endorsements: Class B, high performance, complex, tailwheel.
4. Solo cross-country endorsements.
5. Recommending someone for a practical test.
6. The flight review endorsement.
7. The records you are required to keep as an instructor.
8. Renewal and reinstatement.
9. You draft endorsements, from the current source.
10. What to do when an endorsement is wrong after the fact.

• Hand-write at least four endorsements, looking the content up during the lesson.
• Have each one checked against the source, with the check dated.
• Decline to sign off a student who is not quite ready, and who is very likeable about asking.

1. You draft at least four endorsements by hand, from the current source located during the lesson, with content matching the source.
2. Each draft is checked against the current source and the check is dated.
3. You decline to endorse the not-ready student, state the specific standard not yet met, and say what would close it.
4. You state what you would do in each of the three wrong-after-the-fact cases, including that a correction is dated when it is made and never backdated.
5. You state what records 61.189(b) requires you to keep, and for how long.
6. You identify one North Aero endorsement policy that is stricter than the regulation.
7. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

Three cases, and you will meet at least one of them.

1. Wrong date or a slip, caught before the student flies. Line through, initial, correct, re-date. Do not erase and do not remove the page.
2. Wrong or missing content, caught after they flew on it. Correct it going forward, record what happened and when you noticed, and tell the student. The correction is dated when you make it.
3. You endorsed someone who did not meet the requirement. They do not fly on it again. Tell your chief instructor the same day.

Never backdate. Never erase. Always tell somebody. The instinct to quietly fix it is the one that turns a mistake into a problem.

• Copying wording out of a binder without checking whether it is current.
• Leaving out a required element. This is why every draft gets checked against the source.
• Signing because you like them. Nobody has ever been talked into a bad endorsement by an unpleasant student. It is always a keen, likeable one who is nearly ready.
• Thinking a backdated correction is doing them a favor. It is falsifying a record.
• Not knowing 61.189(b) exists. Most candidates miss the separate record and the 3 year retention.
• Treating an endorsement as paperwork. It is your signature saying a person is ready to do something alone.

Not applicable. Ground lesson.

This lesson has no Video Slots.

The endorsements you draft in this lesson go into your own reference set. You will use them.