Fargo native named University of North Dakota’s Certified Flight Instructor of the Month

‘There is nobody more deserving for CFI of the month than Austin Burud,’ one of Burud’s student pilots says

Austin Burud, a University of North Dakota graduate and certified flight instructor from Fargo, was named in December as UND’s Certified Flight Instructor of the Month.

A certificated flight instructor is a pilot who has been trained in how to teach people how to fly. Flight Instructors take students up in an aircraft and do much of their teaching in the cockpit.

Most airline pilots and other professional pilots worked initially as flight instructors, as the job lets them build flight experience to meet airline and corporate hiring minimums.

As part of the Certified Flight Instructor of the Month selection process, students of the CFIs are invited to submit nominations. The statements that students submitted to describe Burud include,

“Austin has easily been the best CFI I’ve encountered at UND, and that’s saying a lot because I’ve had a lot of great ones since I came here in Fall 2021”; “His passion for instructing and aviation as a whole has definitely rubbed off on me, even at times throughout this semester when I was hitting a learning plateau or getting burnt out. I went from dreading this flight course to not only being excited to fly with him every day, but excited to eventually get hired as a CFI at UND and fill his shoes”; and “He has ALWAYS put his students’ needs above his own. You could absolutely tell that he cared, and that goes a very long way. … He lifts his students up, makes them better pilots, and even better people as a whole. … There is nobody more deserving for CFI of the month than Austin Burud.”

A 2021 graduate of UND with a bachelor’s degree in Aeronautics (Commercial Aviation), Burud holds both Certified Flight Instructor (CFI) and Certified Flight Instructor–Instrument (CFII) certificates. He plans on flying with a regional airline soon and hopes to be based in either Minneapolis or Atlanta.

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Austin Burud (1 MB): Austin Burud, a University of North Dakota graduate and certified flight instructor from Fargo, was named in December as UND’s Certified Flight Instructor of the Month. Photo by Ravindu Meddepola/UND Aerospace.

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