Flight Instructors

As a CFI or CFII, you know that your school’s simulator is helpful for teaching and practicing certain concepts and skills. You may have tried to use the sim to teach situational awareness and radio skills by taking on the role of ATC during training sessions. If so, you know that this sort of role-playing is challenging, and often of limited value.

PilotEdge adds realistic radio simulation, live air traffic control, and live traffic to your simulation sessions. We take care of the ATC so that you can focus on the teaching. If you’ve ever had the sense that much of your students’ “real learning” can only take place in an airplane, those days are over.

With PilotEdge you can:

  • Be the hero at your flight school who helps students get over the radio hump and go way beyond it by working with them on PilotEdge (and by encouraging them to use it at home for practice between lessons).
  • Bring your students’ situational awareness and radio communication skills to a level of proficiency that would be financially unreachable in an airplane.
  • Send your students up for their Private and Instrument check rides sounding and thinking like professional pilots.
  • Productively “fly” with students on days when nasty weather would otherwise have kept you wandering aimlessly around the flight school.

Not From Around Here?

If you’re an instructor based outside of our coverage area, PilotEdge is ideal for Scenario-Based Training (SBT)—even if you’re unfamiliar with the geography and airspace. Contact us for more details on how to include SBT using our network in your course offerings.

Schedule an ATC Failure

When working with students, you’ve probably simulated failing some instruments or the engine. Now you can “fail the ATC” too.

By default, PilotEdge controllers will adhere to the air traffic control procedures and phraseology in FAA Order 7110.65. If it would benefit your student though, they can intentionally make “errors” (through the use of a private text communication channel)

Examples of controller “errors” that can test your students include:

  • Transposing the student’s callsign
  • Leaving the student too high on an approach
  • Sending the student to an incorrect frequency
  • Sending the student through the localizer

Your student might be cool as a cucumber during the approach … until the controller has her doing 120 knots to the marker, and then sends her to the wrong frequency for Tower. Does she say “unable” to the speed and recognize the wrong frequency? If not, does she go back to the Approach controller when the Tower frequency is not working?

The possibilities are endless. Watching your students sweat while they learn is great fun.

PilotEdge gives you opportunities to demonstrate concepts, and test your students under pressure, in ways that are simply not possible in any other environment … not even a real airplane.