Nate Ehlers, founder of "The Backseat Pilot" joins us this week to talk about his company, his career, and his unique path into the world of aviation!
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00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop S73 Cherokee number two following twin traffic three mile final one trolley bravo makesford in Runway two five going four mile.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:26
Bobby Doss
What's up Wally?
00:27
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:29
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. This is a guest joining us today. I have been a customer of his products for almost 10 years now. Referred to a friend when I was beginning to work on my flight training and thought I wanted to be a flight instructor. I still want to be a flight instructor, but I'm a little delayed in my studying and my execution on that. But we have Nate Ehlers on the podcast today. He is the founder of the Backseat Pilot. Nate, thanks for joining us.
00:59
Nate Ehlers
Thank you guys so much. Great to be here.
01:01
Bobby Doss
So Nate, you invented this product years and years ago. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the product and then I'll ask you some questions about your aviation history and kind of what you're doing today. But really, how did the product get started?
01:15
Nate Ehlers
Yeah, sure, the company started, it's been just about exactly 13 years ago. It started with an IFR VFR reference card. I was instructing and looking for a way to make a little additional money, try to supplement the inconsistency of my flight instructing back then. And so I on a downwind at Long Beach Airport, entirely lost comms with the tower, saw a steady green light, we landed safely and taxied off. And I started thinking, man, if under the pressure and I got, you know, a weird flashing light, am I gonna be entirely sure of what I'm supposed to do? So long story short, I made a little reference card that had the light gun signals and I figured I'd go from there and, you know, why not have more critical information or stuff. I don't use that often.
02:04
Nate Ehlers
And so the idea was to put together a reference card for pilots to use and hopefully, you know, build a small little company out of that. And then from there I also included my the flight instructor lesson plans I put together when I was becoming a cfi. And unbeknownst to me, those were considerably more popular and really kind of took off. Not really took off, but slowly grew in popularity and became the more prominent product on the website. And so over the years spent time updating the lessons and keeping them as current and applicable as possible.
02:45
Bobby Doss
We'll get into all the fanciness about what's so valuable about how they stay up to date later in the show. But tell us, I mean, you're not just a technical writer, I assume you are a pilot. I know a little bit about your background. How did you get into aviation and what has been your aviation career up to this point?
03:04
Nate Ehlers
Yeah, absolutely. I had an interesting path, a little different than most people growing up. You know, as a kid, like a lot of us, I knew I always wanted to be a pilot. I didn't know what path I wanted. And coming out of college, you know, without. I didn't have any family in the industry. So I didn't understand the different options too well or know which direction was best for me at the time. My grandfather was a flight engineer on B29s, so that kind of, that is what I assume put the yearn to fly in me. But coming out of school, I went out to a flight school in Georgia at a friend of a friend who set me up out there, got my CFI ratings, went back to California and started flight instructing from there.
03:52
Nate Ehlers
You know, a couple years into that I started thinking maybe the Air Force was a better option for me and you know, was interesting and went to recruiter. It was a five minute conversation of, you're too old, this will never work. Better luck somewhere else. So I walked out of there a little disappointed, ended up getting a regional airline job a little bit later and then found a lot of people in the guard and Reserve as well as a good recruiter. And that put me back on the Air Force track. So after a couple years at the regional, I left the airline on mill leave and started flying C17s for the Air Force.
04:31
Nate Ehlers
I spent about five years as a reservist doing that full time and then went back to kind of that traditional reserve schedule where you're split in time between the civilian and military job. Did that for a couple years, got on with major airline and all the time I've been continue working with the backseat pilot and keeping the lesson plans and content up to date. But, you know, did things a little weird in that I did the whole civilian route first and then went back to the military later and you know, and went from there.
05:06
Bobby Doss
So you're a flight instructor who flies professionally and gets to fly a C17 on the side. That's a, a pretty cool repertoire of airframes. I would have to, I'd have to.
05:19
Nate Ehlers
Say, yeah, it's a great setup and you know, it's a great mix Being able to do the civilian side and then transition to the military and, you know, bounce back and forth, it keeps one side from getting old. You know, you always got the variety and different types of flying as well. The military especially, you know, even the training sorties are, you know, they're a lot more fun than, you know, point A to point B flying. We get to do, you know, low and fast, 300ft, 350, 330 knots. We get to the air refuel, you know, assault landings, takeoffs, that kind of stuff. It's. It's definitely keeps the variety and keeps things exciting.
05:59
Bobby Doss
So, Wally, you don't get to do any low and fast. Do you get to do any 350 knots at 300ft off the ground?
06:06
Wally Mulhern
No, I. I think we'd get. I think I get in trouble for doing that, but I do. I see CC17s all the time. You know, I fly to Honolulu a lot, and every night when we taxi out, we will go right by, you know, all the Air Force C17s. There's usually quite a few sitting there.
06:26
Nate Ehlers
Oh, yeah, that's quite a base they've got out there. And that's quite a place to be based as well. It's got to be quite the life.
06:33
Wally Mulhern
Yeah.
06:33
Bobby Doss
So I think we talked about before we started recording, and you mentioned a little bit about your aviation career there, but you went to the regional. You went like most CFIs do, and you went to the regionals, and now you work for one of the big guys. The path to that for you was very similar to everybody that kind of is a customer of yours, and that's the CFI track. You go through and get your ratings, and then you want to become a flight instructor. I think I learned about the backseat pilot in a similar way where a friend of mine, I was like, man, how do you create all these lesson plans? And he said, well, the best deal on the Internet is the backseat pilot. And I do think it's a phenomenal deal for all that you get.
07:12
Bobby Doss
And I think the big secret sauce that probably is one of the best things about your stuff is that it's a lifetime subscription. So it's a one flat fee. And that flat fee gets you everything. Well, depending on what packages you buy. But whatever package you buy, you get that for a lifetime and all the updates. And so anybody around aviation right now, especially general aviation and certifications, understands that all the ACs were just updated. And I have no question, because I know for a fact all your acs review Documents have been updated to the latest and greatest stuff as it relates to all those items that changed in the acs. Does that work happen overnight? I mean, it's not a one step process. That's a lot of heavy lifting?
07:58
Nate Ehlers
Oh no, definitely not overnight. It is many days and nights of work keeping everything updated and a lot of it is just trying to find the information that's being updated. You know, every once in a while you get an email from a customer which is, you know, great source, but otherwise just staying up to date with everything. You know, when the advisory circulars, for example, were just updated last week. So going back through all the links in there and updating everything with references to the updated advisory circulars and then, you know, not just the changes to the fars and updates like that, but also just trying to improve the content right now, especially the PowerPoints. I don't know if you remember the original PowerPoints that were released a few years ago now, but they were very basic, to say the least.
08:47
Nate Ehlers
A lot of just text on a screen. So it's taken a lot of time and learning and requests from fellow users saying, hey, can we update these? We need a little more energy for the student and you know, learning PowerPoint myself and trying to improve everything, add graphics, add entertainment and you know, just ways to pull the student in. And now working with a professional PowerPoint designer to really add a lot of energy and color and, you know, better design and navigation to the content as a whole. So it's definitely not overnight. It's a lot of work, you know, putting everything together. And these documents, you know, they're not small documents, so updating each one is, it's a little bit of a puzzle finding where everything is and making sure everything fits together nicely and going from there.
09:43
Nate Ehlers
And now is continue to make up more updates, make things hopefully more usable for everyone. Introducing Mac documents, you know, instead of just Word and PowerPoint which requires those programs bringing things over to the Mac side, which just adds another level of updates because now when you make an update to one document on PowerPoint and Word, you got to jump over and update it in notes or pages and keynote.
10:08
Bobby Doss
Yeah, it's amazing. And again, I just logged in to check. I made my purchase, I think it said September 17th of let me look 2017. So I've been a customer for just over seven years now. And I mean I get an email probably once every few months at least on things that have been updated, things that have been improved. I've been a whole shebang purchaser since the very beginning. So pretty much means I bought everything and get all the updates, which is fantastic. And to know that if I want to use keyNote instead of PowerPoint, that's a great option. But the I, I, as a flight school owner, I think the PowerPoints are very powerful. I, I, I know we've talked about this offline.
10:59
Bobby Doss
Our flight school has made a commitment to the backseat pilot content that we're going to use that to have a framework to teach from on a regular basis and use all the goodness of what we use from a Cessna pilot center. But every room at our school has a tv, and I think most kids and most students nowadays are used to having an iPad or something that they just expect they can project on the screen. And your PowerPoints are a huge part of what we do on a regular basis now around the flight school to teach from the same content. We're not, you know, not using Tom Dick or Harry's little something they put together. It's, it's professional stuff, and it's really good stuff, and the updates are extremely valuable to us as well.
11:45
Nate Ehlers
Awesome.
11:45
Wally Mulhern
Thank you, Nate. What I find interesting is I, I listen to you talking about all this and, you know, I, everybody who listens to the show knows I go to Hawaii a lot. And, and you know, typically the night at the, that we're flying back to, wherever we're flying back to, you know, all the pilots say, well, what'd you do on the layover? And somebody will say, well, I went and hiked Diamond Head. And other guy says, well, I rented a motorcycle and drove up to the North Shore and went surfing or whatever. And then they look at me and I say, well, I, I sat in the room and I recorded a podcast and I did DPE stuff. So now I know there's at least one other professional airline pilot who on layovers does this kind of stuff.
12:29
Wally Mulhern
I'm not the only nerd out there.
12:32
Nate Ehlers
No, you're absolutely right. There are plenty of overnights where I've had to head up to the room and, you know, work on lesson plans, updates, make updates, upload stuff. It is, it's frustrating at times, but I enjoy it. I think, I think you're in the same boat.
12:49
Bobby Doss
Well, I think there's something rewarding about it as well. Right? Like, we don't do it, we don't just do it for the money. We're doing it because it helps others. We walked in all those shoes beforehand, and I Think it's. I think it's one of those things that we all remember what it was like and I think we're paying it back a little bit, trying to make a few bucks along the way. But I always think you'll have a lot of free time, but you probably don't have as much free time as those of us that are sitting at home think y' all have when you're on the road. It's not a vacation. Right, right.
13:22
Nate Ehlers
That's true too. There's definitely. There's definitely some short nights, so you don't really have time to get much done.
13:29
Bobby Doss
So I gotta pay a little bit of homage to the guy that referred me to you way back in the day in the. In 2017. His name's Andy. He's in Ohio, does a lot of multi engine training and recently found the bug for those things that fly with the prop on top of it. Like they call them helicopters, I think. And he told me today that you gotta ask the guy to get the helicopter stuff out there. I guess there's back seats in helicopters as well, but we need a backseat pilot for helicopters. Is, Is the helicopter track ever in the future of the backseat pilot, Nate?
14:07
Nate Ehlers
Yeah, I hope so. I've tried a couple times to get that ball rolling. I've gotten a few emails of people asking, you know, can. Do you have helicopter lessons? Are you going to have helicopter lessons? So that is. It's definitely a hope and if not something, finding the right person to get it done. Because my helicopter knowledge is not something you want. You don't want me writing those lesson plans because you want to keep that thing in the air. But yeah, it's. It's gotten close a couple times. Just haven't found someone who's willing to put in the time and understand that it's a long term kind of commitment with these lessons, with the way they're updated and how it all works. But yeah, it's definitely on the list of things to do.
14:52
Bobby Doss
Well, I will encourage him here publicly that Andy can put his free time where his mouth is and maybe he can be the first piece person that maybe helps you towards that path. We both worked in tech for many years together and both found our love and passion for aviation. He is still in tech, but now he's a Mei. He does a lot of multi engine training and a CFI for helicopters and does a lot of cool stuff. So maybe he'll be a branch that can help in that respect. What else maybe does the future hold for the backseat pilot, if anything, that you're able or willing to share with us today?
15:29
Nate Ehlers
Yeah, big picture. I've got a lot of, you know, like anyone who's been growing a product for a while, I've got a lot of ideas and ways I want to improve things and help people out. I think the biggest options right now, you got the Mac documents. Hopefully I'll have those uploaded tomorrow. If not, worst case in two days. The improved PowerPoints. There's been requests for CFI instructor ACS reviews, so those will start to move in as well soon. But bigger than that, I've gotten the feeling there's a lot of students who are instructor students in particular who are working on their instructor ratings without a lot of guidance. And it seems to be difficult to figure out how to get the ball rolling. I think just this, say this week, but it might have been the last three days.
16:22
Nate Ehlers
I've gotten two emails from customers asking about, you know, a track to get on to get their CFI going and not having a lot of guidance from the flight school or their instructor that they're working with. So hopefully putting together something that will, you know, kind of supplement any formal training people are doing, whether that's once a week for a month and a half meeting and, you know, talking about the fundamentals of instruction and instructing, even if it's over zoom or over the Internet, just to get comfortable with it and get a little more information and foundation for your instructing skills, more prepared for the instructor. Check Ride. On top of that, long term, I've got an app is definitely a big priority that'll take a little longer.
17:16
Nate Ehlers
There's a few more pieces I want to put together before we start building an app out or figuring out what makes the most sense, whether we build our own or find a way to work with another company. But an app I think would be very helpful for the students and just making accessing the lessons and the updates a little easier and cleaner. Everything in one place. But yeah, a lot of ideas and a lot of ideas actually come from customers as well.
17:45
Wally Mulhern
The.
17:47
Nate Ehlers
A number of updates come from emails I get from people using the material and saying, hey, you know, what about this idea? Or what if you include this or change this, you know, add this and that's. That's some of the best advice I can get because these are people using the content every day and catching things that I may not think of or don't see. And so getting those emails are great. And I think, well, I'll be careful What I say because I have not been able to implement all of them because there have been quite a few, but I have a list of pretty much everything. I've been asked to include that. Slowly try to check the box on and get that stuff included because, you know, everyone's got great ideas on how to improve the content.
18:26
Nate Ehlers
And kind of going back to what we talked about earlier is these updates are totally free too. So once you're in, you know, I'll keep updating this stuff, I'll keep improving it, try to make it the best it can be, and then keep seeing these updates that people request on their own. It's a great kind of circle of life, if you will.
18:47
Bobby Doss
Well, that's no doubt the reason that people keep referring you, referring people like me to your product, because it is a really good solution and I would say it's very economical. I don't know. Today, the price for the whole shebang, I believe on your website is 150 or 200 bucks. And you get those updates for life. You get so much material. Imagine PowerPoints, ACS reviews, all the lesson plans. I think when I printed the lesson plans, I got a 3 inch binder and it wasn't big enough. It's like 400 pages. If you printed all that stuff out to have as reference material and all the reference data and all those links that you talked about to the advisory circulars and to the other material that's out there, it really is a lot of content. I just pulled up the private ACS review. This is.
19:43
Bobby Doss
Why don't you describe what an ACS review is from your perspective as the founder of the Backseat Pilot? I think the ACS for private is about 80 pages total from the FAA. What is your vision of what the ACS review is so that someone understands what they would be going to your website to procure?
20:04
Nate Ehlers
Yeah, absolutely. Those came about when the FAA started transitioning from the PTS to the acs. Excuse me. There was kind of a. I don't know what the right word is, but a missing link, you know, as they transitioned the private and the instrument and the commercial over to the ACS and then left the instructor CheckRide on the PTS. The two CheckRide documents didn't really mesh super well. So instructors were taking their checkrides based on the PTS documents and then going to instruct students based on the HCS material. So although, you know, the major concepts stayed the same. Steep turns were steep turns. The fars still existed in the same way. The way the students were tested versus the Instructors were tested were slightly different.
20:56
Nate Ehlers
So the initial idea was to build a bridge between the two and provide a document that took all that instructor material that you've taught and then just tailored it in a way specific to the private, pilot, instrument or commercial student. Over the years, and especially now that things have transitioned almost fully to the acs, you've seen a lot more people use them as study guides, instructors included, and they still kind of serve that bridge between the two, where you can teach from the CFI lesson plans and then use those ACS reviews to kind of maybe provide a mock oral or use a bit more structure from the ACS for the student.
21:44
Nate Ehlers
And then lastly, even I've gotten a couple emails recently asking for the instructor ACS reviews just for instructors to review in addition to the lesson plans in order to prep for their checkride. So that's, I think, as I mentioned earlier, something else that'll get the ball rolling on soon. Yeah.
22:01
Bobby Doss
And those that are listening and they can't really visualize what we're talking through. The ACS review for private is 359 pages long. And there's tons of content built into the components of the ACS with hundreds, if not thousands, tens of thousands of hyperlinks. So where the ACS might reference some of the places you would find information like the Airplane Flying Handbook or the Pilot Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, the Backseat pilot ACS review document hyperlinks to all of those places, including the FAR, references to the FAR and the AIM and everything that would be at the CFI's fingertips as they were going through this ACS to both check and validate that the person may be answering the question on a mock checkride or mock oral. Was saying the right thing. Extremely valuable content by having all those hyperlinks.
22:56
Bobby Doss
And it's designed in a book format so you can use it as an ebook in an Apple device. And you have all the chapters and links back and forth like you would in a book. And same thing with Word as well. I can go back and forth in the table of contents like you would expect to be able to do. So it's not just one long PDF. It's very interactive type documents that puts you right at the right answer or the real material by hyperlinking you to it all the time. So all cool stuff about the future, I'm going to tell my friend you promised to do the helicopter stuff by the end of the week. Was that. I'm just kidding.
23:35
Nate Ehlers
That's only fair.
23:37
Bobby Doss
I have no, I have no idea how much time and effort you must put into this. As I just was going through the ACS review recently, the FAA changed all their links to the handbooks like the Pilot Handbook of Radar Knowledge and the Resource Management Handbook. And yours are all working. And I know what a level of effort it took just for us to change it in a little bit of our content of our teaching material. So that is a mountain of work and effort. So thank you for the updates. Any kind of. I think there was something you said you were passionate about and dream to do once you get caught up. What you want to take a small walk down the road and take care of some other pets. I think you said, are you passionate about taking care of pets?
24:22
Bobby Doss
And what maybe can some of those people listening to the show do to expand on your vision of taking care of those things in the future?
24:31
Nate Ehlers
Yeah. Yeah, A couple ideas. So right now things are a bit busy between the civilian flying job, the military flying and keeping the backseat pilot running in time. I hope to see a little more free time, you know, in the next six months or so as things start slowing down. And you know, there may be some changes. But big picture, I think with that free time, a couple things I'm hoping to do. One, one I'd love to get involved with the Anti Cruelty Society. There's one just down the road from me and takes care of the stray dogs and cats and you know, I've always been a dog lover, so that's something I'd love to get involved with. Find a way to help out there. And then too big picture and more focused on the backseat pilot finding a way to.
25:19
Nate Ehlers
I'll back up a second. I remember how difficult it was, you know, going through flight training and the enormous costs. And then that combined with coming out of flight training as a CFI and maybe having an inconsistent schedule and not the highest paying job. And so it can be a bit of a struggle. And a lot of us have that dream of becoming a pilot and we'll do whatever we can to make it happen, even if that means, you know, living off some, a lot of ramen for a lot of years.
25:49
Nate Ehlers
So finding a way to give back and you know, helping whether it's through another flight school or someone like you guys and just finding those students who really need some help and finding a way to help out and keep them on the track and make sure that their dreams of flying and making it and you know, getting that airline job, CFI job, whatever it is in the industry and just finding A way to help out there. So it hasn't been nailed down yet of how to make it work, but yeah, that's. Both of those are definitely something I look forward to helping out with or getting involved with as time opens up a little bit over the next few months.
26:27
Bobby Doss
Awesome. And we'll, I'm sure we'll always have a funnel of people who could use that help, and we're happy to help however we can. Wally is a designated pilot examiner and somebody who does cfi. Add on checkrides and mei. Add on checkrides. Lesson plans are important people teach to you. What parting advice do you have to those out there that maybe want to use a tool like the backseat pilot? How to make teaching a little bit better, a little bit easier, a little bit more fun for the person that's learning?
26:59
Wally Mulhern
Well, as I go through and I look at these resources and I'm not just this, I mean, I'm saying this because I believe it, but I. This really is a good product. You know, I, you know, I do MEIs and double eyes. I'm not authorized to do CFI initial check rides, but I, I have my applicants teach me. I did a couple of MEI rides today, so I have them teach me, you know, a couple of things, and it may be all right. Tell me, teach me about VMC or Blue Line, what it's all about, and by and large, what happens. And this is what I tell the people. I say, look, I'm tired, I have a short attention span and I get bored easily, so please don't make this boring for me. And they'll usually make it pretty boring.
28:00
Wally Mulhern
And what I try to get them to do, I say, look, make it interactive. Quiz me. Or maybe not. So quiz me. But ask me. You know, I do believe the best way to learn how to do something is to teach it. And I encourage CFIs. You know, when they say to their student, okay, we're going to come back day after tomorrow or next time we fly. And we're going to work on power off stalls, just picking a maneuver and tell your student, what I want you to do is I want you to teach me how to do power off stalls now. Yeah. Is this a student pilot? Someone that has maybe, you know, six, seven hours of flight time? Yeah.
28:47
Wally Mulhern
But if you ask them to teach you now, they're having to dig, they're having to research, they're having to come up with Some plans. But again, when. When I have the applicant teaching me things, a lot of times it just turns into a lecture and they're just. Just lecturing me. And, you know, I go to certain flight schools, I get the same lecture from everybody because it's the can lecture that they got. And, you know, I pretend like I'm falling asleep with them usually. And sometimes it does get very boring. But I just tell them that they have to. They've got to engage the student. They also have to read the student. They have to be able to read. Is this student getting this? Because if the student's not, you know, what's the point?
29:46
Bobby Doss
No doubt. And I think the PowerPoints and the documents that are at your fingertips when you buy the whole shebang, which is pretty much everything behind the Pro. It's everything that the Backseat Pilot sells in one kit, and you have access to all the updates and downloads for the rest of your life. It's the way to go for sure. If you want to acquire the Backseat Pilot, if you go to Behindtheprop.com there's a link at the top of the page that says the Backseat Pilot. We're partners with the Backseat Pilot, and so is United Flight Systems, my flight school. When you click on that link, you'll go to our website, our storefront on our website. And when you purchase it on our website, you're going to save 10% buying it from United Flight Systems.
30:32
Bobby Doss
And if you use coupon code podcast P O D C A S T, you'll save an additional $10 and it'll be the, hopefully the best way to get it. Nate will know you listened purchased it through us, and we'll continue to get to promote him and promote his stuff. Hopefully as he releases new content, his app and other things, we'll have him back on the show to share it with the world and the aviation community. Nate, I can't thank you enough for taking time and appreciate the partnership. Our CFIs use it every day to teach our students. And we love what you're doing. Thanks. And keep doing it.
31:10
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. Thank you.
31:11
Nate Ehlers
Yeah. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate you bringing me on here. It's been great talking to you.
31:16
Bobby Doss
Thanks. And for everybody out there, as always, fly safely and stay behind the prop.
31:23
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@brave.theprop.com behind the prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss. Co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening. And remember, fly safe.