12 General Aviation News — 800.426.8538 June 21, 2018By JANICE WOOD
A free online ground school is now
available, with the goal of offering 21st
Century training to create safer pilots.
Launched just seven months ago in
December 2017, Fly8MA has already at-
tracted more than 5,700 students, with the
roster growing exponentially.
Founded by CFI and regional airline
pilot Jon Kotwicki, Fly8MA grew out of
Jon’s own frustration.
“We had students coming in for training
who had used other ground schools and
books and they just had tons of questions
and were not understanding the material,”
he recalls. “I thought, ‘there has got to be
a better way to transfer this knowledge.’”
Using experience gleaned while teach-
ing at the University of Michigan, he
started making videos — at first for his
own students — to fully explain the more
abstract concepts, such as going into
Class C airspace or showing stalls by tap-
ing strings to the wing.
“That branched into adding short les-
sons to the videos, building them into
more effective lessons plans,” he ex-
plains. “It was all for my students. Then
I started putting the videos on YouTube
and got a whole bunch of feedback from
people that was really positive.”
Spurred by that feedback, he decided
to build his own online ground school,
teaching himself how to write code.
“The whole premise is to reduce GA
accidents and fatalities through better
instruction and a different approach to
flight training,” he says. “We’re trying to
bring flight training into the 21st century
and use all the awesome technology, es-
pecially adaptive learning, where students
take quizzes and can actually see where
they’re lacking. That helps them focus
where they need to study.”
The ultimate goal: Reduce GA acci-
dents and fatalities.
“Ultimately, even if just one guy doesn’t
die because of it two or three years from
now, it’s totally worth it,” he says.
But Kotwicki has another goal: Bring-
ing new people into general aviation.
Offering the ground school for free
helps break down some of the barriers to
getting started flying, he says.
The school now has more than 250
videos available, with more being added
every day. And the videos are short —
ranging from 30 seconds to one or two
minutes — since people have a hard time
concentrating on longer videos or are so
busy, anything longer would become a
barrier to becoming a pilot.
While the basic ground school is free,
pilots can subscribe to different levels,
which open up additional features.
That keeps him from hemorrhaging
money, as well as allows him to continu-
ously update the website and pay the CFIs
who work for the service.“To keep it going on forever, I created
different levels of membership where
people could actually pay and get access
to a few more courses. Also, with the
higher-level membership, they get ac-
cess to sitting down with a CFI via Face-
Time or Skype where they’ll actually do
a full check ride live with the CFI, who
will give them the full practice oral, tell
them what to expect on the check ride, an-
swer any questions they have from their
written, from their training through the
ground school. They get that one-on-one
with a real person.”
“There’s nothing that can replace a
CFI,” he continues. “It doesn’t matter
how much awesome technology I’ve put
together. A lot of times, students won’t
even know how to ask the right question,
so Google and YouTube won’t help them.When an experienced CFI can sit down
with that person and talk to them for just
a few minutes, they can say, ‘Here’s actu-
ally what you’re telling me. Here’s what
you’re lacking,’ then re-explain the con-
cept in a different way and make it click.
“To me, that’s the difference between
somebody going for a check ride and
passing or failing or someone going and
flying a year or two after their check ride,
getting into a situation that they misun-
derstood, applying an incorrect control
input and either being an NTSB report or
just getting into a scary situation, landing
later on and being like, “Wow, thank God
I had that training.”
The different subscription levels range
from free to $30 a month to $99 a month.
Many pilots start out with the free ac-
count and then move up to a different
level, like Dan Beck of State College,
Pennsylvania.Free ground school offers 21
st
Century learningFly8MA’s Jon Kotwicki.Photo courtesy Jon Kotwicki