Busy Tuesday: 2 major events to tell you about

Ben is a European Flight Instructor!

Ben passed his EASA Flight Instructor checkride – whoo hoo!! Remember a couple months ago when the checkride was stopped midway because the examiner discovered Ben didn’t have enough instructional hours? Remember how discouraged we were? Remember how we didn’t know what would happen because the European regulations were changing and we worried he might have done all this work for nothing? 

Turns out that the UK ended up postponing the implementation of the law changes and Ben was able to make up the lacking instructional hours. The additional time meant that Ben could still be approved under the current system which recognizes his previous experience and gives significant credit for the course. With the completion of the checkride yesterday the school may now submit the application for the issuance of Ben’s EASA FI rating to the UK CAA. 

Ben will now go to work as a flight instructor on the European team. This will be a significant change to his day to day work load – one that we are excited about! Currently Ben has six students that he is responsible for tracking, scheduling, teaching flight lessons, and teaching theory lessons. As part of the European team he’ll have 4-6 students but with the structure of the program will not have to focus so much on teaching theory (there are fulltime ground instructors for that). Instead, he’ll be able to focus on teaching flight. He will have 4-5 prescheduled flights each day instead of the 1 or 2 flights and 2 or 3 theory lessons he currently has. The result, more experience in flying the aircraft! 

Home Study Completed

The second major event of yesterday is the completion of our adoption home study! Our social worker completed the home study and yesterday dropped it off at Brevard Family Partnership for the final signature. Once BFP reviews and signs we will officially be approved to pursue children for adoption! 

We’ll receive a copy of the final document and start to contact case managers of the children we’d like to get more information about. We’ll also be able to attend matching events and meet some of the children in need of families in our area. This doesn’t mean we are anywhere near having a child move in with us because the matching process can take a long time. But we are at least out of the paperwork weeds for a little while!