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Greg Brown was flipping through a trade magazine when he noticed the photo of a student from his days as a flight instructor in Lafayette, Indiana.

Her name was Ellen Dean. Brown remembers her as an unassuming university student who rode her bicycle to the airport to take glider lessons from him.

"She was a shy young woman with no real background in flying," he says.

She is now one of the best aerobatics pilots in the world. And her status as a three-time member of the U.S. national aerobatics team did not escape the attention of the media.

"I opened up all the magazines, and there she was," says Brown. "That was quite a thrill for an instructor. I taught her nothing about aerobatics, but something I did must have worked there."

Brown is certainly one of the best flight instructors around. He grew up around planes -- his dad was a pilot and owned light aircraft -- and he had completed his first solo flight at the age of 19.

But he could not fulfill his ultimate professional goal of flying for a commercial airline. He says that in the late 1970s, airlines had restrictive hiring standards, and he did not meet them.

"They would not hire anyone who wore glasses, and they would not hire anybody who was not a military-trained pilot," Brown says. So he became a flight instructor instead.

What makes a savvy flight instructor? "One is a passion for teaching," says Brown. "Two is a passion for flying. And three is a great deal of patience because [flying] is taught one-on-one."

Anton Tammpere showed a lot of patience during a training flight over the coastal mountains of British Columbia. He told his student to fly from the town of Abbotsford near Vancouver to Pemberton, a small town near the ski resort of Whistler.

After he consulted the map, the student set a course through a steep valley. There was only one problem. The valley was a dead end. Tammpere noticed the mistake of his student right away. But instead of correcting his student immediately, Tammpere decided to let him fly into the valley.

As the flight went on, the student became more confused because the map did not match up with what he was seeing outside the cockpit. The student eventually realized his mistake, and turned around well before it would have been difficult to escape the tight confines of the valley.

It was a very real and dramatic experience for the student because he witnessed the consequences of his mistake, Tammpere says.

"Now the student is thinking about the flight," he says. "You gotta make the flight training as real as possible. You gotta give real scenarios, and you gotta let the student make some mistakes.

"But on the other hand, as you let the students make mistakes, you gotta know when it is enough because you can endanger the flight."

Nobody has been able to establish a direct link between a higher accident rate and the quality of the instructors, Brown says.

"We agree that experience is a growing problem, and we are concerned about any increase in accident rates," he says. "But we don't know if the lack of experience is the cause of the increased accident rates."

But the accidents raise some serious questions. They point to a growing problem many flight-training schools already face: a shortage of qualified instructors. And this shortage may ripple right through the entire industry.

Commercial airlines are desperate to fill their cockpits, thanks to mandatory requirements and a high demand for air travel. This scramble is good news for pilots who want to move on. But it is not good news for flying schools because many of their senior instructors cannot the resist the lure of getting paid a lot of money to fly a large jet.

This means some of the remaining instructors are barely qualified to teach others how to fly. And some of those people whom they teach will be future flight instructors. So it is not impossible to foresee a future where a barely qualified flight instructor is teaching another aspiring flight instructor.

"So you [have] got ducklings teaching ducklings how to fly," says Dorothy Schick. She is a master flight instructor from Eugene, Oregon. "That's a serious problem."

But it is also a great opportunity for people who want to stay in their local area, be professional pilots and come home every night, Brown says.

Just ask Schick. A corporate salesperson for 18 years, Schick opened a flight school following two deaths in the family. "I realized that you [have got to] do what you love in life," she says. "And I love being with people, which is why I was in sales. And I love flying."

Ironically, she has had less time to fly on her own since she became a flight instructor. "The funny sort of thing is that you don't get to fly as much for your own recreational purposes," she says. "But what I can say is that I have learned a lot more. You learn a lot if you try to teach somebody."

She has also met a lot of interesting people in her new career. "Once you spend anywhere between 40 [and] 65 hours in an airplane with someone, you develop a good relationship."

And it's hard to beat a sunny day up in the sky while the rest of us slave away.

Ask Schick if she misses the drudgery and dullness of the office, and the answer is a resounding no. "There is no comparison," she says. "I don't know how to even compare it. I haven't once missed going into a cubicle."

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