SkyHoppers Chief Instructor

The Chief Instructor for SkyHoppers Aerial Adventures is Andrew R. Dilworth. Andrew is an American FAA Certificated professional Flight Instructor (CFII) and Instrument-Rated Commercial Pilot with 20 years of experience and thousands of hours of flight instruction given in various single-engine airplanes. Andrew also holds Advanced and Instrument Ground Instructor Certificates, and has thousands of hours in Tailwheel, High-Performance, and Complex aircraft.

The idea for SkyHoppers Aerial Adventures originated when Andrew first became interested in flying while sitting on the beach in the Caribbean during a winter vacation in 1999 when he spotted a Cessna fly low overhead. From that moment on, the thought of adventure flying so intrigued him that he enrolled in flight lessons upon his return to San Jose, California, with the intention of operating his own aviation business in the Caribbean someday. Less than 3 years later, Andrew had earned all his professional qualifications, and started building his experience as a self-employed flight instructor at the Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose, where he began doing business as SkyHoppers Aerial Adventures.

Since 2003, Andrew has logged more than 11,000 hours performing flight instruction, including more than 3,000 hours in the Cessna Skywagon alone. His balance of hours includes more than 6,000 hours total high-performance time primarily in the 'heavy' single-engine Cessna 182's and 206's with turbochargers & 'RG' models, and the rest in the ubiquitous Cessna 172, Glastars, and other tailwheels including Citabrias, and even a couple hundred hours in the quintessential Cessna 170. Andrew also performs training in G1000 equipped airplanes and trained in person at the Cessna factory in Kansas. Andrew's passion though is his own 1980 Cessna 180 Skywagon in which he has offered specialized high-performance-tailwheel transition training, and 'Flight Training Excursions' since 2008, and even authored an article on flying the Skywagon for the August 2018 issue of Cessna Owners Magazine.

His other professional accomplishments also include having served as a Major in the USAF Auxiliary-Civil Air Patrol where Andrew performed as a Senior Pilot Examiner and Search & Rescue Pilot, holding a Master Phase 4 Certificate of Proficiency in the FAA Safety Team Wings program, and serving a consultant for the appraisal and purchase of Cessna aircraft. For 2012 & 2013 he also received many nominations for the Flight Training Excellence Award from AOPA placing him among the top 25 flight instructors in the country in that poll for those years.