About Us

Owner/Aviation Side: Nate

The creator of The Backseat Pilot, Nate is a CFI, CFII, MEI, ATP, an airline pilot, and a C-17 instructor pilot in the Air Force Reserve. Nate has upwards of 6,000 hours of flight time in Cessna, Diamond, Piper, Pitts, Embraer, Boeing, and Air Force (T-6, T-1, and C-17) aircraft. Having been trained on the civilian side, by the airlines, and by the Air Force, Nate has a wealth of aviation knowledge to apply to The Backseat Pilot.

CFI Prep Course Instructor: Chris

Chris has over 18 years of experience as a Gold Seal Flight Instructor (CFI, CFI-I, & MEI) and a commercial pilot flying the PC-12. Since graduating from Flight Safety Academy in 2006, he’s built a career as both a lifelong instructor and a commercial pilot, with experience spanning various Cessna, Piper, Diamond, Mooney, and Pilatus aircraft. Chris is passionate about helping others reach their aviation goals. Whether you’re just starting out or preparing for your CFI, he brings a wealth of knowledge, practical insights, and a supportive teaching style to Backseat Pilot.

Business Side: Johnny

A finance manager and the owner of a private consulting firm for software start-ups, Johnny provides the business acumen to keep The Backseat Pilot running smoothly.

Products:

The Backseat Pilot reference card was born from a lost comms situation at the Long Beach airport. The tower's radios went out on downwind for 25L, and after lining up on final we were given the steady green light clearing us to land. I later realized that had they given us a different light gun signal I may not have been 100% sure of what to do. There's a lot of information pilot's need to know that is rarely used, except in unusual or emergency situations. To prevent putting myself in another situation like this, I immediately began carrying a reference for the light gun signals, and the reference card slowly grew from there to what it is today: a compilation of the most critical, difficult to retain, and useful information for a pilot to have on hand at any time.

I vividly remember the tremendous amount of time I spent working on my CFI, CFII, and MEI lessons. A backbone of lesson plans that I could build off of would have been extremely helpful and saved me weeks, if not months, of time preparing for the checkride and becoming an employed pilot. I hope these lessons can be a backbone for instructors to tailor to their own teaching styles and needs.

Why We're Here:

We love aviation, that's why we developed a website by pilots for pilots.

We strive to provide the most comprehensive and useful products for flight instructors and pilots alike. We're always look for way to update our lesson plans to make them more useful and informative and will continue adding resources to the website. We're here to help you. If you have any questions, suggestions, recommendations or just want to talk about flying please don't hesitate to send an email. We like to think of this website as the second step (the first step was the previous website) to reach our end goal: Aviation is a family and in time we hope to continue by building a brotherhood of flight on the internet.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns you can reach us at info@thebackseatpilot.com.

Disclaimer: The Backseat Pilot is not affiliated with the Department of Defense (DoD), and any information contained here may not necessarily reflect the views of the DoD or any associated organizations.

This is amazing

It’s so much content. I truly believe the hardest thing as an instructor is knowing what you need to teach and figuring out where you need to be for each student. This makes it so easy, like a checklist to help learn as an instructor and better yourself for your student or client.

Thanks, Sebastian! Really glad to hear it's working out. There's a lot of content in the works with the goal of making it even easier!

Nate
Owner, BSP

CFI-I Lesson Plans

Don’t go to checkride without it

Only reason I passed my CFI-initial on the first try. Worth its weight in gold.

Congrats, Christopher! That's a HUGE accomplishment. So glad to hear the content could play a part in your success. Thanks for the review!

The Whole Shebang

This really hurts to say

But, I have to dock 2 Stars from Gryffindor. While all my positives still stand from the CFII Lesson Plans, there's one massive massive negative that I need to point out; Task II.I. is garbage. I had to rewrite a sizeable chunk of it because the Flight Planning portion, especially the E6B portion, had no detail what soever. Also the Hazards segements in later lesson plans are just incredibly repetative.

Hey Karl, thanks so much for the thoughtful review.

It stings to hear II.I. didn’t meet expectations, but I appreciate you pointing it out. The Extra Detail version of the lesson has a lot more... detail - which may be exactly what you were looking for there. It breaks down a lot of the calculations, whereasthe standard lessons were condensed to just include the main steps to keep things streamlined. The Extra Detail version also mentions when to reference the E6B, but I didn’t want to overload the lesson with another lesson on how to use an E6B, especially when a lot of students and instructors are going electronic, and when the instructions are, for the most part, included on the instrument. I'll definitely see what I can do to balance everything out though.

As for the Risk Management/Hazards, I totally agree. They’re annoyingly repetitive. Unfortunately, that’s baked into the design of the ACS itself - it repeats the same risk management concepts across numerous tasks. That said, I’m working on tightening them up so they’re a lot less tedious but still checkride-ready.

Really appreciate you taking the time to share the information—it helps a ton. And I'm glad to hear the rest of the content is working out well. If you come across anything else, don't hesitate to reach out - info@thebackseatpilot.com. Thanks!