Advice from an airline Captain to LFC student pilots

March 24, 2025
Articles & Resources

3 pieces of Pilots advice for LFC Students that is applicable to all your phases of your flying career:

Number 1:

ENJOY THE NOW – be the best at what you are doing now

if you are a fresh PPL or fresh Comm pilot or a fresh Co-Pilot, what ever rank or aeroplane or roll you play now; be the best at what you are now.

You will get to the next step, but you get their easier if you embrace each step and enjoy each step (don’t wish it away just to get there) do the best job of what you’ve been given now.

NUMBER 2:

CONFIDENCE CURVE, there is such a thing as too high confidence… and… there is such a thing as too low confidence.

The reality is, that you will ride this confidence graph up and down like a rollercoaster through your time line. When you are under training, your instructor is trained to help you through this, but eventually you will have to gauge yourself.

Like in an aircraft, you have gauges in front of you, the goal is to keep all the gauges in the green. You as a professional pilot has to keep yourself in check, when your confidence “virtual gauge” starts red lining , you need to do something about it.

Have a chat with another experienced flight crew that you can trust or your flight instructor,

The thing is, we ALL ride this wave and it’s closely connected with training. As you gain a new skill your confidence slides and as you achieve your mile stones, your confidence rises,

We ALL experience this, but not ALL are will to share about it. If you know about it before it happens, then you can more easily recognise and react appropriately,

You will see both limits , but it’s what you do when you hit those limits that will potentially define your career and even your course of life.

NUMBER 3:

WATER OFF A DUCKS BACK,

When you make a mistake in a test or in front of your flight instructor, let it go! Otherwise , it can become a snowball effect…

You sit there thinking to yourself, how could I have done that, now what must my instructor think of me and as you dwell on that mistake, you miss the next thing ..

Learn from the mistake, and then … let it go, then you can think clearly to avoid further mistakes. This is prominent in testing checking scenarios when the stakes are high and you could be signed out or recommended for further training.

Captain Joshua Gerlag, currently captain at Cemair, previously LFC CFI and then Captain at Cathay Pacific.

Captain Joshua Gerlag

“I’m in Germany at the moment doing simulator training at the Lufthansa Training Centre. Here’s a photo of training system I developed for Cemair as their Training Concepts Developer. This is group number 15 of my CTT course that I give on my device I built…”