How Many Lesson Plans Do I Need for the CFI Checkride?

Here's the honest answer to the question every CFI candidate asks at some point: there is no required number. The FAA doesn't say "bring 40 lesson plans or you fail." No examiner has a checklist that counts your plans and stamps them approved. What actually matters is coverage — can you teach, on the spot, whatever the examiner hands you?

That's the whole game, and once you understand it, the number question answers itself.

What the checkride actually requires

Your CFI checkride runs under FAA-S-ACS-25, and the relevant part is Area of Operation IV: Technical Subject Areas, Task A — the Maneuver Lesson. Here's how it works: the examiner assigns you one or more maneuvers from the ACS Areas of Operation (slow flight and stalls, steep turns, ground reference maneuvers, takeoffs and landings, and the rest), and you teach them. Right there. As a preflight lesson, with the examiner playing the role of your student.

You're not graded on your steep turn. You're graded on your teaching. The examiner is scoring whether you stated an objective, whether the lesson was organized, whether you used a visual aid, whether you covered common errors, whether you stated completion standards, and whether you actually evaluated understanding — real questions, not "any questions?"

So "how many lesson plans do I need" is the wrong question. The right question is: "can I teach every maneuver in the ACS without scrambling?" If the answer is yes, your number is right. If the answer is no, no number of binders will save you.

What a DPE actually wants in a lesson plan

Examiners don't care where your lesson plans came from. They care whether you can teach from them. A good lesson plan — one a DPE respects — has five things:

1. An objective. One sentence: what the student will be able to do when the lesson ends. This is the first thing the examiner listens for, and most candidates skip it.
2. The elements. The content of the lesson, in the order you'll teach it. Aerodynamics, procedure, technique — organized so the student always knows where the lesson is going.
3. Common errors. The mistakes students actually make, named before they happen. This is the step most candidates skip, and examiners notice.
4. Completion standards. The ACS numbers, stated plainly. The student should know exactly what "good enough" looks like before they try.
5. References. PHAK chapter, AFH chapter, the ACS task itself. Shows the plan is grounded in the actual source material, not vibes.

That's it. If your plan has those five things and you can teach from it without reading it word-for-word, it's a good plan. If it's a beautiful 12-page document you've never read, it's a liability. Which brings us to the real debate.

Bought vs. homemade vs. hybrid: the honest version

Let's talk about the three options, because everyone wrestles with this, and the forums will give you ten different answers.

Homemade. Writing all your own plans from scratch. The upside is real: you learn the material deeply, and you know every word in the plan because you wrote it. The downside is also real: it's 60 to 100 hours of work, minimum, and most candidates run out of time, burn out, and show up with half-finished plans. A half-finished homemade set is worse than anything else on this list.

Bought. Somebody else's complete set, downloaded or purchased. The upside: instant coverage, professional formatting, done in a day. The downside, and it's a big one: examiners can tell — within about two minutes — whether you've ever actually read your own plans. When the examiner says "teach me lazy eights" and you flip to a page you've clearly never opened, fumbling for the objective while reading someone else's words for the first time, the lesson is over before it starts. A bought set you haven't studied is just an expensive way to fail.

Hybrid. This is what I'd actually recommend, and it's what most working CFIs end up with. Start with a solid base set — bought or from a course — so you have complete coverage of every ACS area from day one. Then make them yours: rewrite the objectives in your own words, add the common errors you've actually seen students make, mark up the teaching figures, tab the pages. Study them by teaching from them, not by reading them.

The examiner doesn't care where the plans came from. The examiner cares whether the person holding them can teach. A hybrid set you've rehearsed beats a homemade set you never finished, every time.

The 7-step format: one backbone for every plan

Here's what makes the difference between a stack of plans and a system. Every lesson plan you own — all of them — should follow the same format. When the examiner assigns you a maneuver on the spot, you shouldn't be figuring out how to structure a lesson. You should be running a format you've run a hundred times.

The format I teach is seven steps, and it maps directly to what the ACS grades:

1. Objective — one sentence, first 30 seconds. What the student will be able to do.
2. Motivation — why it matters. One real-world hook. Without this you're lecturing, not teaching.
3. Roadmap — the elements of the lesson, in the order you'll teach them.
4. Teach — demonstration-performance. Explain it, demonstrate it, student performs it, you supervise and correct.
5. Common errors — name them before the student makes them.
6. Standards — the ACS bar, stated plainly, before the student tries.
7. Check and close — real questions that prove understanding, recap the objective, give the assignment.

Memorize these. Run them in order, every time, for any maneuver or ground lesson. Hit all seven and there is nothing left in the examiner's head to mark you down on. It doesn't matter whether the examiner hands you steep turns, power-on stalls, or short-field landings — the format doesn't change. Only the content does.

How to actually use them on checkride day

Having good plans and using them well are two different skills. Here's the practical side:

Teach from the plan, don't read it. Glance down, then talk to the student. Eyes on the learner, not the page. The moment you're reading paragraphs aloud, you've stopped teaching and started reciting — and the examiner knows the difference.

Tab your binder. Color tabs by ACS area so you can find any maneuver in under ten seconds. When the examiner says "teach me chandelles," you should be on that page before they finish the sentence. Fumbling through an untabbed binder for two minutes is a terrible first impression.

Use the teaching figure. Every lesson plan should have one visual — a diagram, a chart, something you can point at. Put it where the student can see it and point at the diagram while you teach, not at the wall. "One teaching figure per lesson" is a rule worth tattooing on your brain. Examiners specifically score whether you used a training aid.

Time-box the brief. A maneuver lesson brief is 15 to 25 minutes, not an hour. Talk in short bursts — explain, then make them do something. If you've talked for five straight minutes, you've lost them. The examiner will stop a rambling lesson, and that's a fail, not a time-saver.

Brief the errors before, debrief after. Name the common errors in the pre-brief so the student is watching for them. Correct them in the debrief. That rhythm — prevent, then correct — is what instructional knowledge actually looks like.

For more on what the day itself looks like, I've written up how long the CFI checkride really takes and what to bring on checkride day — the documents checklist that keeps the morning from going sideways.

What to do this week

Forget the number. Do this instead:

Pick any maneuver — steep turns, power-on stalls, whatever you want. Write the lesson plan in the 7-step format: objective, motivation, roadmap, teach, common errors, standards, check and close. Keep it to one or two pages. Then close the binder, set a timer for five minutes, and teach it out loud to an empty room.

Notice where you stumbled. That's what you don't actually know yet. Go back and fix it.

Do that once a week for every maneuver in the ACS and you'll walk into Area IV having already taught each one dozens of times. That's not a study strategy — that's checkride rehearsal. And it's the reason most people who fail the CFI checkride fail: they studied the material but never practiced teaching it.

If you want a blank template to start from, there's a free one on the free sample page — the same format, no email required beyond the download.