“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.”   — Mark Van Doren

FAA Credentials:  Commercial Pilot, CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI.  3400+ hours TT, 2000+ hours instruction given.

Don has received awards from AOPA, FAA and American Bonanza Society for his activity and professionalism in aviation instruction:

• Winner of AOPA Flight Training award. This award is based on AOPA’s annual survey of actual verified students. It’s based on both the ratings of the students of the instructor, as well as requiring a high percentage of students to take the time to respond to the survey. In short, it says Don’s students like his instructional techniques, and his caring personality. You can see Don listed among award winners here: aopa.org.
• FAA Gold Seal Instructor Certification. The FAA awards a Gold Seal Instructor Certification to CFI and CFII candidates who demonstrate that they are both very active, and very successful instructors.  To achieve a Gold Seal Certification, an instructor needs to have a minimum of 10 applicants take FAA Checkrides within a 2 year period, and a minimum of 8 of the 10 need to pass their checkride on their first attempt.
• American Bonanza Society – Beechcraft Pilot Proficiency Program.  Don is one of only 2 CFI’s in Wisconsin with this accreditation – See announcement in ABS magazine by clicking article below.

Don enjoys helping non-pilots become pilots and pilots become better pilots. He has trained and enjoys working with anyone: men/women, aged 17 to 70+, able bodied to paraplegic, military cadets to engineers to accountants to yoga instructors for ratings from Sport Pilot through Instructor. In several cases, Don has taken over for other instructors when students/instructors needed different learning styles/techniques.

You want a laid-back instructor who knows how to communicate with various kinds of people and can teach you to fly as efficiently as possible? You’ve come to the right place. The flight instruction industry is full of instructors who either attempt to “command and control” (not teaching) or are just in it for a year to build time to get an airline job. We aren’t those people.

Short video of a trip around the pattern at KETB, then to KUES with a client in a “new to them” Cirrus SR22

Don is a business person who deals with multiple personalities every day. Who can understand, communicate, and can adapt to your learning needs, whether you are a 14 year old crazy about flying who can suck up information like a sponge and has 500 hours of game/simulator time, or a 79 year old who always wanted to fly and needs a different strategy for absorbing and remembering detailed FAA regulations.

We only have 2 firm rules at Hangar50:

1. Be Safe.
2. Have Fun.

Why is rule #2 not rule #1? Because you can have fun without being safe, but not for long. Once you are flying safe, you can have a lot of fun, for a long, long time.

We can teach anyone to fly, but here are a few areas of speciality:

Working with individuals to match their individual learning needs for learning efficiency. This can be anyone from a 14 year old from a flying family; to a 70 year old who never had the time, but always had the passion for flying; to a middle aged mom recovering from a broken leg to a pilot who has been unable to fly for years due to medical, and wants to get back to flight via Sport Pilot.

Any desired certification from Sport Pilot, Recreational Pilot, Private Pilot, Commercial Pilot, Certified Flight Instructor or CFI-Instrument.

“Expanding the envelope”. We’ve met several pilots, some of them with many hundreds of hours, who fly regularly, but only within about 5% of their aircraft’s safe envelope. Some may be scared of weather or some other factor, but most just fly the limited envelope they were trained in to pass an FAA Flight Review, without the knowledge or confidence on how to “play” with the airplane and safely expand their personal envelope. Do you enjoy stalls, steep turns? Have you safely tried Commercial maneuvers like accelerated stalls, Chandelles, Lazy 8’s? Can you feel your coordination well enough to fly Dutch Rolls blind-folded (with a safety pilot!)? More importantly, if you are ever faced with an emergency situation, like needing to trade airspeed for altitude right now, are you comfortable knowing how far you can safely go? Airplanes are amazing machines, safely exploring what they can do, not just the minimum needed to pass an FAA Flight Review, will not only be fun (Rule #2), it will definitely make you a safer pilot (Rule #1).

We’re happy to work with experimental aircraft that you provide (within insurance limits), and have experience in over 50 different aircraft types from Light Sport aircraft to Twin Turboprop King Air. Largest blocks of experience in Beech Bonanza (BE36/BE33/BE35/BE55), Cirrus (SR22/SR20), Piper Cherokee 6 (PA32), Glastar (GLST), Piper Arrow/Warrior (PA28), Cessna (C172/C172RG/C152), Piper Seminole II (PA44T), (Flight Design CTLS, but have experience flying several different experimental types, including Glastar, Vans, Zenith, Sonex, Allegro,  Earthstar and Genesys.