Every instructor here was once a student

/ Every instructor here was once a student

Every instructor here was once a student

Fly Oz

Share this post

Ask any flight school where its instructors trained. At Fly Oz the answer is short: here. Every instructor on the team was once a Fly Oz student.

Lyn Gray, the school’s Head of Operations, put it plainly when asked: “Every instructor here was once a student. I do not think there is anyone who was not, was there?” The school has grown from two people to a team of more than 20, and the teaching team grew from inside it.

What that actually tells you

It would be easy to read this as convenience. It is the opposite. Nobody comes back to teach at a place that let them down.

An instructor who trained here made a choice twice. Once when they picked Fly Oz as a student, and again when they finished, looked at the whole industry and decided the thing worth doing next was teaching the course they had just been taught. That second choice is the strongest review a flight school can get, because it is made by the person who saw everything.

What it means in the briefing room

Your instructor sat in your seat. Not a seat like yours, your actual seat, in the same aircraft, on the same syllabus, at the same airfield. They know where the course bites, which week feels like a wall and what got them through it.

It also means the teaching stays consistent. The philosophy here, do it the long way first, was taught to your instructor before they ever taught it to you. Nothing gets lost between generations, because the generations trained in the same room.

The students who feel this most are the ones who found bigger schools hard going. Lyn’s most treasured piece of student feedback is five words long: “thank you for believing in me.” It tends to come from people who started somewhere larger and got lost in the crowd.

The culture that makes people stay

None of this happens by accident. CEO, Mark Dixon’s view of running the school is simple: “If you’re good to your staff and you look after your people, then they’ll look after their customers. So it’s sort of a no-brainer.” He also says the culture is why he still likes coming to work after all these years.

You can see it in small things. The Friday barbecue. The pool table in the hangar. Owners, instructors and students sharing the same space with no hierarchy by design. People stay because it is a good place to be, and students learn better in places where the teachers want to be there.

If teaching is where you want to end up

Some students know from day one that instructing is the goal. For them, the Instructor Ready pathway takes the commercial licence and instrument rating and adds the Flight Instructor Rating on top, building 270 total flight hours across the full course.

To be clear about what we are and are not saying: none of this is a promise of a job. It is a record of what has happened here so far. But if you want to teach, you will be learning from people who took exactly that path.

Starting further back? Our Charter Ready CPL course is where everyone here began, instructors included. Either way, request a call and we will talk you through which path fits.

Stay up to date with Fly Oz

Training insights, course information and practical aviation knowledge from the Fly Oz team delivered to your inbox.