FlightSafety International Employee Reviews for Instructor

"If you are considering working as an Instructor at FSI you would be well advised to read ALL the reviews posted by former/current Instructors and Training Center Evaluators (TCE’s). A few reviews are positive, some are neutral, but many are very negative. Take the few positive ones with a huge grain of salt and pay close attention to the negative reviews, they are very accurate and consistent. I’ve worked at multiple FSI locations and experienced most, if not all of the negatives that reviewers have posted. The problems that Instructors experience are not limited to one or two flight training centers but are at ALL the centers, it is systemic. The negative reviews have common threads (i.e. Severely inadequate Instructor staffing, lying management, ineffective/incompetent management, top heavy management, non-caring management, horrendous schedules that constantly change, the expectation that the Instructor is available around the clock and at a moments notice. Instructors are effectively on call 24/7/365 (with the exception of two personal days and accrued vacation time), and a quality-of-life close to zero. I’ll address each of these common threads. When the term “management” is used I’m generally referring to corporate/upper-level management, however, there are times when negatives apply to lower-level management as well. Severely inadequate Instructor staffing: This is the biggest problem an Instructor will experience and leads to a host of other problems (i.e. lacking quality-of-life, constantly changing schedule, very long work hours, eventual ineffective Instructor training and ultimately Instructor apathy and burn-out). In every department I worked the instructor staffing level was below where it needed to be. Once an Instructor resigns, the company may, or may not hire a replacement Instructor. The process of hiring a new instructor is a very long and drawn out process.(Word count limit.)"

"These are greedy, ruthless, clever people. Zero stars. I sincerely advise any flight instructor looking at this job, in particular the Wichita East location where I worked, to go elsewhere. Low quality of life is the main issue, plus a plethora of related problems such as greed, lying, and circumvention of instructor responsibility. There was a low quality of life. I was in Caravan G1000 as a sim and ground instructor at Wichita East during 2017 and the first quarter of 2018. Lying is endemic in this company. There is a truly punishing 2 year non pro-rated training agreement required of all instructors. It’s a sweatshop processing atmosphere in the Caravan and King Air programs. Program managers lie to instructors about how to handle weak clients, of which there are many because of the deliberately inadequate client screening. Lies are told by both human resources, program managers, and sales to support the revenue stream and keep it going. If you think I’m kidding you’re risking going through what I did. Such behavior in a company is depraved and obviously unacceptable. Lack of integrity. The first untruth they spout comes before you are hired, “our instructors choose Flight safety because of our good quality of life”. This is patently untrue. Let’s examine this lie and why they use it. What’s going on is that Sales starts off the lying process to incoming clients by telling them they are qualified to buy expensive flight training packages when often times they are either incompetent or cannot speak English, or both. In turn, the program managers must push these unqualified pilots through their programs. When I complained about this to my manager, “grade them as you see them” was his quick reply. But the de facto policy is quite different, that you must pass each and every client no matter what, because if you do not, you will be negatively censored by the client feedback system."