Mike trained me during 10 consecutive and intense long days. This included flying on Dec 31st and New Year’s day. We were based in KSUS, Spirit of St Louis, MO. We flew a nice and well equipped PA28-180 Archer II: N9513C. We achieved the required 40 hours of SIMC with an average of two flights a day, including a few session of simulator when snow covered the ground a couple mornings.

At 48 and 500 flight hours in various French aero clubs, I engaged this IFR training as a way to progress further and travel more often and more safely despite cloudy weather. I found the AFIT accelerated training a nice fit to my busy schedule. The stay in the US was a very intense experience, both from a “professional” and personal relationship standpoint. Flying has been and will remain leisure for me, but this course had the same unique objective as for anyone else: getting IFR certified.

Fully committed to make me succeed, Mike has this right balance of being a very nice person with a constant level of original English humour, but also knows to be tough enough when things are not done the way they should. Yet he had the patience to let me make mistakes to learn from, repeat and make me repeat again and again the essentials, until they become “a new religion”, like the famous 5 T’s. Mike maintained consistent pressure towards the objective and would not let me get distracted or over relaxed. He monitored daily we were on track, by achieving serious flying lessons every single day. And Mike also knows to measure and encourage progress along the way.

Moments of this training reminded my private pilot, over 20 years ago. Some of the Instrument stuff was hard enough for me that I sometimes had the feeling I was learning flying again from scratch. In this situation, Mike had this good old-style experienced instructor approach, teaching or reminding me plenty of little tricks that improve technique:

This course was great Fun and a great experience and I thank Mike for his contribution.