Why we built LessonDebrief

After every lesson, my CFI did something I didn't expect.

He'd pull out his phone, open a notes app, and start typing. Not his logbook—that came later. He was writing me a brief. A quick rundown of what we covered, what I struggled with, what I should study before next time, and a few oral questions to test myself on.

It wasn't fancy. Sometimes it was a bullet list in a text message. Sometimes it was a page-long note he'd email me that night after he got home from a full day of flying. It had things like “review slow flight entry procedures,” “re-read the AIM section on Class B airspace,” and a couple of questions I'd probably get on my checkride.

I looked forward to those briefs more than I expected. They gave me structure between lessons. Instead of showing up and hoping I remembered what we talked about last week, I had a list. I could check things off. I could show up and say “I reviewed the crosswind correction stuff you mentioned—can we try that again today?” My CFI noticed the difference. I was more prepared. The lessons were tighter. We wasted less time re-covering old ground.

The difference between a student who gets a study brief and one who doesn't is real. It's the difference between passive training and active learning.

But here's what I also noticed: it took him real time to write those. He was doing it between students, on his lunch break, sometimes late at night. And he was doing it for every student. He had eight of us. That's eight custom study plans, written from memory, after a full day in the cockpit.

Most CFIs don't do this. Not because they don't care—because they can't. They're flying six, eight, ten hours a day. By the time they land, they barely have time to log the flight, let alone write a personalized study plan for every student. So what happens? The student leaves the lesson, forgets half of what was discussed, and shows up next time slightly less prepared than they should be. The CFI re-teaches. The cycle repeats.

So I built the tool my CFI was already doing by hand.

LessonDebrief lets a CFI finish a lesson, record a one-minute voice debrief—just talking naturally about what happened—and get back a full, structured study pack. Takeaways from the lesson. Weak areas to focus on. A concrete study plan with tasks and time estimates. Oral practice questions. The relevant FAA references. A maneuver brief if applicable.

The CFI reviews it, edits anything they want, and sends it to the student. The student gets an interactive checklist they can work through before the next lesson. The CFI can see their progress. Everyone shows up to the next lesson on the same page.

What used to take my CFI 20–30 minutes of writing per student now takes under two minutes. And the output is more thorough, more consistent, and more useful than what anyone could reasonably produce by hand at the end of a long day of flying.

I didn't build LessonDebrief because I thought flight training needed more technology. I built it because I watched my instructor do something genuinely valuable for my training—and realized almost no one else was getting that. Not because instructors don't want to. Because the math doesn't work. You can't hand-write eight custom study plans a day and still have a life.

Now the math works.

Every student gets the brief. Every lesson feeds the next one. And CFIs get to focus on what they're actually good at—teaching people to fly.