I want to share a project that sits right at the intersection of two things I care about: teaching people to fly, and building things in the open. It's called the CFI Compendium — an open-source, community-driven library of flight-training lesson plans.

The problem it solves

If you've ever worked toward a certificate or rating, you know the curriculum landscape is fragmented. Good lesson plans exist, but they tend to live in a single instructor's binder, a flight school's internal materials, or behind a paywall. Each instructor reinvents the wheel, and the collective expertise of the instructing community rarely accumulates anywhere a student can actually reach it.

Open source solved this exact problem for software a long time ago. A single, version-controlled, community-vetted body of work tends to beat any one closed source, because every contributor's experience compounds into the same place. There's no reason flight-training curriculum should be any different.

What it is

The CFI Compendium is a growing collection of structured lesson plans — written in the familiar format every CFI knows: objective, elements, equipment, instructor and student actions, and completion standards, with references back to the FAA handbooks and the POH. The lessons are stored as plain Markdown in a GitHub repository and rendered through a fast, searchable static site, so you can read them in your browser or fork the whole thing for your own use.

The goals behind it are simple:

• Free access — quality training material available to everyone, no paywall
• Collaborative improvement — instructors from different schools, regions, and aircraft contribute perspectives and refinements
• A living document — curriculum that evolves with regulation changes and better teaching methods, with every change tracked in version control
• Community credibility — material that gets more trustworthy the more eyes review it

Why I built it this way

My day job is building software and machine-learning systems, so reaching for Git, Markdown, and a static site felt natural — but the deeper reason is that those tools enforce exactly the behaviors good curriculum needs: every edit is reviewable, every claim is attributable, and improvements are additive rather than overwriting someone's binder. It also keeps the barrier to contributing low: if you can write a lesson in a text file, you can contribute.

How to get involved

Whether you're a CFI, a designated examiner, an airline instructor, or a student pilot who spotted something that could be clearer, contributions are welcome. You can browse the lessons, open an issue, or submit a change directly on GitHub.

• Browse the site: gol3tron.github.io/cfi-compendium
• Contribute on GitHub: github.com/gol3tron/cfi-compendium

As always, this is meant to supplement — not replace — formal flight training. Consult current FAA publications, your CFI, and applicable regulations for official guidance.

Tailwinds, and fly safe!