Bruce Thompson DPE Checkride Gouges

Oral Emphasis

Bruce's CFI oral is heavily weighted toward Fundamentals of Instruction and your ability to think like a real instructor. Reports consistently highlight these major topic areas:

• FOIs / Teaching Theory: Human needs, defense mechanisms, barriers to communication, characteristics of effective assessments and effective questions, lesson plan organization, and how to deliver assessments — especially negative ones. He wants you to reference the ACS/syllabus when delivering unsatisfactory results, positioning yourself as the messenger rather than the judge.
• Instructor Responsibilities & Ethics: Instructor-student relationship boundaries, professionalism (attitudes, hygiene, etc.), professional development, and the difference between helping learners learn vs. just providing instruction.
• Risk Management: This is a recurring theme throughout the entire checkride. Expect deep dives into PAVE, external pressures, FRATS, when to introduce risk management to students, and common CFI-specific risks.
• Aeromedical Factors: Hypoxia (definition, symptoms, causes, CO poisoning), fatigue, dehydration/nutrition, hazardous attitudes, alcohol regs (91.17), carrying intoxicated passengers, and oxygen requirements — including why day and night supplemental oxygen altitude recommendations differ.
• Regulations & Airworthiness: Determining airworthiness from maintenance logs, recurring ADs, supplemental type certificates, special flight permits, Parts 1/61/91, pre-solo endorsements (with examples of what they look like), logbook entries, and record keeping.
• Airport Operations: Runway incursions (definition, hotspots, mitigation strategies, using taxiway diagrams/moving maps), pilot-controlled lighting (intensities and click sequences), ATC light signals, AC 90-66C, right traffic pattern regulations (91.126), and airspace classes/equipment.

Common Questions

Bruce doesn't just quiz you on rote knowledge — he asks scenario-driven and conceptual questions that test whether you can think like a teacher:

• He may show you a video and ask you to connect its message back to your role as a CFI. The answer he's looking for centers on investing in your students and showing genuine care.
• Expect questions about how you'd handle a student struggling with a concept — he wants to hear that you're humble enough to refer a student to another instructor if your teaching style isn't clicking.
• He'll ask about teaching adult learners specifically: what challenges arise (frustration, hand-eye coordination difficulties) and how you'd relate new material back to the student's existing knowledge or career.
• When discussing assessments, he'll probe on different types, what makes them effective, and how you frame negative feedback without making it personal.
• Questions about endorsements may require you to show actual examples — not just describe them in the abstract.

Practical Focus

Flight time reported was approximately 1.7 hours. Limited specific detail was provided about the flight portion in these reports, but risk management was noted as a theme that carried from the oral into the flight. Come prepared for the standard CFI maneuver set with an emphasis on being able to teach and explain throughout.

Examiner Style

• The oral runs long — reports indicate approximately 4 hours — so pace yourself and stay sharp.
• Bruce is conversational and scenario-based rather than purely formal. He wants discussion, not recitation, though knowing source material (like Todd Shellnut's FOI content) clearly helps.
• He's comfortable leaving you alone to work through something independently (e.g., watching a video by yourself) and then discussing your takeaways.
• He'll add to your answers and guide you toward the points he's looking for, which suggests he's more collaborative than adversarial. If you're close but missing a key element, he may nudge you in the right direction.

What Surprised Pilots

• The opening video exercise caught applicants off guard — it's not a standard FOI quiz but a curveball that tests how you connect broader human themes to the instructor role. Don't panic; think big picture about caring for your students.
• The depth on assessments was notable — pilots reported spending a large chunk of oral time just on assessment types, delivery, and framing negative results.
• He places real emphasis on professionalism details that many applicants might gloss over, including instructor hygiene and attitudes — not just airmanship.
• The expectation to show actual endorsement examples and demonstrate logbook fluency goes beyond what some applicants prepared for.