How Draganfly instructors are qualified, how they are kept aligned with one another, and how that alignment is checked. Below is a process too insure all instructors hold the same meaning of “qualified” with regard to evaluation of students. All of it is built out as a course in the LMS: Instructor Initial Qualification (IP-IQ-01).
The instructor qualification standard (IQS-01)
Instructing has its own qualification standard, built exactly like a platform standard: tasks, measurable standards, proficiency codes, evaluation methods, and a source reference on each task. It differs in one structural way — it sits on top of a platform standard rather than beside one. A candidate must already hold platform qualification at teach-and-evaluate proficiency, so instructing on an aircraft is gated by being qualified on it — while the teaching skill itself carries across the fleet.
| Area | Covers |
|---|---|
| I — Instructor authority and limitations | What an instructor may authorize, intervention criteria, when to terminate a lesson, currency requirements. |
| II — Fundamentals of instruction | The learning process and levels of learning, mapped to the knowledge and performance codes used in every standard. |
| III — Lesson delivery | Brief, demonstration and practice, the intervention ladder (the graduated response to student deviation, from verbal cue to taking the controls), debrief. |
| IV — Grading and documentation | Applying the grading standard, completing grade sheets, task-level records. |
| V — Calibration and standardization | Taking part in calibration sessions and resolving disagreement against the written standard. |
| VI — Evaluation conduct (evaluator tier) | Qualification evaluations, standardization evaluations, downgrades and requalification. |
When to intervene is a judgment call — no standard can script it, because every situation is different. What can be trained is the escalation path and the floor: an instructor must intervene when a compromise of flight safety is imminent. Below that threshold, letting a student work through an error is the instructor’s call, and every intervention is recorded on the grade sheet.
Almost every task in it is marked C in the Transfer column: teaching carries across aircraft. An instructor moving from the Heavy Lift to the Commander 3XL adds a platform qualification — one instructor standard serves the whole fleet, where each aircraft needs its own platform standard.
IQS-01 is summarized here rather than published in full; the worked sample on this site is PQS-HL-01.
The qualification path
| Tier | Gate | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Instructor Candidate | Current platform qualification with teach-and-evaluate proficiency (P3, the highest PQS performance code) demonstrated on designated tasks | Teaches only under supervision of a qualified instructor |
| Qualified Instructor (QI) | IP-IQ-01 complete + initial standardization evaluation passed | Instructs and grades; has its own currency requirements |
| Evaluator | Selected from qualified instructors by Flight Operations | Conducts qualification and instructor standardization evaluations |
The grading standard
Every flight task gets an entry in the maneuvers-guide format — Description / Objective / Procedures / Standards / Common Errors / References — with explicit criteria for each grade (U unable / F familiar / Q qualified / QI qualified-instructor). This is the instrument that makes all instructors grade the same flight the same way. An excerpt from the Manual Landing entry:
STANDARDS: Q — all steps unprompted; touchdown within the target landing location with no visible drift; gear extension verified; no bounce or tip-over tendency; callouts complete. F — safe outcome but prompted, visible drift at touchdown, touchdown outside the target location, a bounce, or a callout omitted. U — instructor intervention, yaw input during throttle reduction, tip-over, or approach to the aircraft before disarm confirmed.
The manual publishes the touchdown drift limit as 0.2 m/s (GCS Section 4.6). The grading standard states the same requirement as what an instructor can observe from the ground.
The format follows the FAA Practical Test Standards task layout — references, objective, numbered elements — as carried into the Jeppesen maneuvers manuals, which add procedures and common errors, and into the Embry-Riddle standardization manual I trained under.
It is the same approach the Chief Pilot and I used at SUNY Farmingdale, where the maneuvers guide put every instructor on one grading standard as the program built toward Part 141 certification.
Calibration — keeping instructors aligned
Quarterly, all instructors independently grade the same recorded flight against the written standard, then resolve divergence by reference to the standard — and where the standard was ambiguous, the standard gets fixed. Grading variance per task is tracked over time: falling variance means standardization is working; a task with chronically high variance has a badly written standard, not bad instructors. With a small instructor cadre this is a flag-raiser rather than a statistic — two evaluators disagreeing twice on the same task is worth a look; a percentage is not meaningful until the volume supports it.
The evaluation program
Modeled on the USAF aircrew standardization/evaluation structure, simplified for commercial unmanned aircraft systems (UAS): an initial evaluation before QI designation (the evaluator grades the instructing and the grading, not just the flying), a periodic annual evaluation observing an ordinary training flight, and for-cause evaluations after incidents, variance patterns, or student-failure trends. An unsatisfactory evaluation suspends QI status; requalification is specific to the deficiency, and the record shows the whole story — downgrade, corrective action, requalification.
The no-surprise principle
Instructors are evaluated against the same published standards they teach from, exactly as students are evaluated against the Platform Qualification Standard (PQS).
Train-the-trainer
The first instructor cadre is trained centrally; designated evaluators then qualify the next ring in the field using the same PQS, grading standard, and calibration mechanism.