First week instructing.

F

falconkidding

Line Up and Wait
Joined
Sep 11, 2014
Messages
773
Location
over there
Display Name
Display name:
Falcon Kidding
Right rudder. More right rudder. Watch your coordination. Balls still out of the cage.
You can use trim, sure you got it trimmed out right? trim the nose down a bit here. Grabs controls 5 min later and it wants to pitch up 20 degrees.

On landings more backpressure more more more hold it hold it hold it... student releases backpressure halfway through the roundout and we land flat and bounce.

Its fun sitting right seat watching a 5 hr student say im above the glide slope pulling power back. Then frustrating as heck a student doesnt care to take something seriously and will miss half his runup checklist.

35hrs down 1200 to go. I already feel like a broken record lol
 
You may suffer burnout before 1200 hours. Remember students don’t typically spend a small fortune and not care. Hang in there.
 
Trim ball was a pet peeve of mine in helos as well. Drove me nuts. “Right pedal. Left pedal.”

I always found it interesting how students react to questions while flying. Generally flight control goes to crap when they divert their attention to a task other that flying. Because of that, I didn’t ask too many questions early on in training.
 
falconkidding said:
Right rudder. More right rudder. Watch your coordination. Balls still out of the cage.
You can use trim, sure you got it trimmed out right? trim the nose down a bit here. Grabs controls 5 min later and it wants to pitch up 20 degrees.

On landings more backpressure more more more hold it hold it hold it... student releases backpressure halfway through the roundout and we land flat and bounce.

Its fun sitting right seat watching a 5 hr student say im above the glide slope pulling power back. Then frustrating as heck a student doesnt care to take something seriously and will miss half his runup checklist.

35hrs down 1200 to go. I already feel like a broken record lol
Click to expand...
On the backpressure thing, just tell them "don't land, don't land". And the checklist thing will go on for a long time with most people, decreasing obviously as time goes on.
 
Don't be another one of those. Those being.... a lousy young instructor there for only one reason. It's selfish, and it makes everyone under your tutilige miserable, including yourself. Establish this reputation and students will politely avoid you, which will push your end goal further down the road.

Don't forget, you are there to learn too, (they will teach you, ready or not) and there's always somebody out there smarter, and better than you. Even if they don't know how to fly an airplane yet. A good flight instructor must have patience, must be cool under pressure, and above all, must possess the ability to safely control an aircraft to the ragged edges of the flight envelope. If you allow an aircraft to land flat and bounce, or worse, that's your fault, not the students.

A well organized instructor will feed knowledge one bite at a time, then evaluate progress. Force feeding is counterproductive. The previous comment here, about trying to be the instructor you always wanted when you were the student, is absolutely on point.
 
I think you can still be a good instructor that wants to go the airlines. I had no intention of staying as an instructor and my one goal was to make it to the airlines. I had a 100% pass rate and gave all my students ample notice before I left. I set them up with different instructors who I thought would be a good personality fit. As long as you give them 110% of your time when you’re working with them it’s fine. Have fun! You’ll learn a lot.
 
Yep, hopefully your attitude changes and you start enjoying instructing. It does take a awhile to find your teaching style and the ability to adjust for different learning abilities of various students. You're just starting out with an airline job apparently as your goal. But as Jordan wrote above, that's fine and nothing wrong with that. Hell I did it. But while you are instructing give your students all you got, don't be afraid to admit you're wrong about something, and if you can't answer a student's question don't bullshet them. Tell them you'll research it and get them an answer. Good luck!
 
falconkidding said:
I enjoy it but under no illusion that after a few months of 6 or 7 day weeks flying in the pattern im gonna get burnt out. Keeping end goal in sight helps.
Click to expand...

There’s other ways to get paid to get 1200 hours.
 
TCABM said:
There’s other ways to get paid to get 1200 hours.
Click to expand...
Yeah but outside of Alaska not a whole lot for low time pilots that provides time. So ill do this for 10 or 12 months then move on. I like it im just realistic on the downsides. I think im just coming off way more negative than intended. Such is text communications.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
You should try to be the instructor you always wanted when you were the student.
Click to expand...

I always try to bring that up when I’m working with CFI students. Think back to your primary and advanced training and the CFIs you had. It is likely that you had some instructors that you liked and others that you didn’t. Try hard to emulate the good instructors and try equally as hard (or harder) to not be the instructor you hated as a student.

I also suggest going into the job of instructing knowing that you don’t know everything and knowing that you’re going to learn as much as your students are. Plus, have fun. Instructing can be enjoyable for everyone when done right.
 
falconkidding said:
Yeah but outside of Alaska not a whole lot for low time pilots that provides time. So ill do this for 10 or 12 months then move on. I like it im just realistic on the downsides. I think im just coming off way more negative than intended. Such is text communications.
Click to expand...

It seems to me like there are plenty of time building jobs outside of Alaska right now. Look around a little bit and you’ll find something if that is what you’d rather do.

It may just be the text communication but your first post and the subsequent responses do come off as having a poor attitude toward instructing in my opinion. If you go into the instructing business not wanting to enjoy it you won’t, and your students will suffer for it. My primary instructor had a similar attitude and I feel like I could have learned more if I had used someone else for training.
 
falconkidding said:
I enjoy it but under no illusion that after a few months of 6 or 7 day weeks flying in the pattern im gonna get burnt out. Keeping end goal in sight helps.
Click to expand...
My instructor has been doing that for 40+ years and still going strong at 83.
 
:lol::lol::lol::lol:

Does it make you feel like finding your old instructor and apologizing to him/her...??

I found tapping my foot on the right rudder was more effective than constantly saying right rudder, right rudder. Sometimes a voice in the headsets can be more annoying and distracting than good. Sometimes.
 
hindsight2020 said:
Good luck with that outlook.
Click to expand...

That.

But on a side note, have the students relax and feel which way they want to lean and step on the rudder to counter that, staring at a little ball isn't the best. When I CFIed it was primarily in the back of taildraggers, I couldn't see the ball, or much of anything aside from half the tach and ASI, maybe a bit of the altimeter depending on how big the student was and if I wanted to try to poke my head around, I could always tell if the plane was out of coordination without needing to see the ball.

Work on sight picture for landing vs just doing a rote task like more back pressure.


Like the others said, be the CFI you wished you had, and if you don't at least somewhat enjoy it, not sure you're going to make it to 1500, nor should you

Enjoy the ride, watching the office in a jet a burner hauling along a giant straight magenta line in the flight levels is kinda boring, if you were just looking to make money, lots of areas far easier than aviation to do that. Never really understood the rush to the airlines mindset.
 
Last edited:
mryan75 said:
My instructor has been doing that for 40+ years and still going strong at 83.
Click to expand...

There’s a BIG difference, sometimes, between someone that loves aviation and someone who has a job in aviation. OP probably loves aviation, it just doesn’t sound like it from his post. He just had his cowl flaps open for a minute.
 
Honestly the only instructor I would ever fly with would be James331...the greatest instructor of all time
 
falconkidding said:
Yeah but outside of Alaska not a whole lot for low time pilots that provides time. So ill do this for 10 or 12 months then move on. I like it im just realistic on the downsides. I think im just coming off way more negative than intended. Such is text communications.
Click to expand...

So let me share some of my experience from my military career as a formal training instructor on the line and in the schoolhouse.

In your role as an instructor, seek to be the best instructor. Develop you style to solve the student’s problem in a manner that’s natural for the student to learn.

I hazard to guess you’re teaching the mechanics in a rite fashion, according to the syllabus. What do you know about your students learning styles and motivating factors? How do you adjust for their preferences? Do you begin each lesson with the end in mind—if the end is no uncoordinated flight, how do you approach the concept of why uncoordinated flight is a negative behavior and how it impacts all other portions of the student’s journey to and through the check ride?
 
Well, I don’t take the OP’s comments as negative and nothing wrong as using the job as CFI to build hours to get to the airlines. He even stated, he’s enjoying it.

Know your stuff, be professional but not a robot, don’t enforce technique as a standard, do your best to make the learning process enjoyable.
 
God invented airplanes and students in order to kill CFIs.
Somewhere between the bored kid who played too much "Air Combat 7", and the 70 year old who" always wanted to fly, but life got in the way", you are going to find a few students whose eyes light up when they walk out on the ramp, and come alive when they get behind the controls.
Those are the ones you live for.
 
My op was intended along the lines of all the problems i had in training i now get to see from every student. Meant to be lighthearted. Perhaps my hour countdown gave wrong impression.
Flying with some kickass students this weekend, makes things kinda scary you want to solo them but you want to see them make mistakes and recover.
 
have you taught stalls yet? I'm sure I frustrated my private instructor as I struggled with these.
 
James331 said:
This is true, sometimes I even give myself dual ;)
Click to expand...

59e22b83380e632d751585862ba345c5.jpeg
 
Shepherd said:
God invented airplanes and students in order to kill CFIs.
Somewhere between the bored kid who played too much "Air Combat 7", and the 70 year old who" always wanted to fly, but life got in the way", you are going to find a few students whose eyes light up when they walk out on the ramp, and come alive when they get behind the controls.
Those are the ones you live for.
Click to expand...
Sounds like an intro to a short film. That was deep
 
Shepherd said:
Somewhere between the bored kid who played too much "Air Combat 7", and the 70 year old who" always wanted to fly, but life got in the way", you are going to find a few students whose eyes light up when they walk out on the ramp, and come alive when they get behind the controls.
Those are the ones you live for.
Click to expand...

I really liked this quote from an article in Flying Magazine when I read it a number of years ago. Your post above reminded me of it.

Lane Wallace said:
I’ll run my hand gently over the wing of a small airplane and say to him, "This plane can teach you more things and give you more gifts than I ever could. It won't get you a better job, a faster car, or a bigger house. But if you treat it with respect and keep your eyes open, it may remind you of some things you used to know — that life is in the moment, joy matters more than money, the world is a beautiful place, and that dreams really, truly are possible." And then, because airplanes speak in a language beyond words, I'll take him up in the evening summer sky and let the airplane show him what I mean.
Click to expand...
 
jordane93 said:
Nothing wrong with counting down the hours. Stop demonizing instructors who want to move on. If the instructor is counting hours but gives their students 110%, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Click to expand...
That’s the key though. IF the instructor is truly willing to give their students 110%, then great. There is nothing wrong with counting down the hours.

But, unfortunately, there are CFIs out there that hate teaching and are only counting the hours and not giving the student anywhere near 100%. I had one of those for my ME training. He could fly fine, but had a ****ty attitude about instructing and it showed. All he wanted was an airline job and as soon as he got an offer, he split and left me and others hanging. He wasn’t doing anyone any favors.
 
My primary CFI told me early on that the airlines were not for him and that he planned to be a career instructor. Fast forward a year later and he was an FO at PSA, now Captain. Said he just got burnt out of the daily grind, which is totally understandable.

Not a thing wrong with instructing toward an airline end goal, just give the students enough heads up before you depart and they’ll be just fine. For me, I just changed over to another fellow that I enjoyed equally and he finished up my certificate.
 
Fearless Tower said:
That’s the key though. IF the instructor is truly willing to give their students 110%, then great. There is nothing wrong with counting down the hours.

But, unfortunately, there are CFIs out there that hate teaching and are only counting the hours and not giving the student anywhere near 100%. I had one of those for my ME training. He could fly fine, but had a ****ty attitude about instructing and it showed. All he wanted was an airline job and as soon as he got an offer, he split and left me and others hanging. He wasn’t doing anyone any favors.
Click to expand...

My first CFI left to be a corporate pilot. I found out when I showed up for a lesson and he had left for Lear Transition Training.

When he had been around, every single lesson lasted 90 minutes. I logged and paid for the plane by the Hobbs, and paid his fee by his watch. Discussion, preflight, fly, postflight. 90 minutes. Sometimes I'd log 0.6 or 0.7.
 
falconkidding said:
Right rudder. More right rudder. Watch your coordination. Balls still out of the cage.
You can use trim, sure you got it trimmed out right? trim the nose down a bit here. Grabs controls 5 min later and it wants to pitch up 20 degrees.

On landings more backpressure more more more hold it hold it hold it... student releases backpressure halfway through the roundout and we land flat and bounce.

Its fun sitting right seat watching a 5 hr student say im above the glide slope pulling power back. Then frustrating as heck a student doesnt care to take something seriously and will miss half his runup checklist.

35hrs down 1200 to go. I already feel like a broken record lol
Click to expand...

Remember, you were a student once.. :eek:

As for the one that doesn't care... part of your job is to ferret these people out... You may want to have a talk with them noting your concerns... there are plenty of other things they can waste their money on that doesn't require a $50 per hour babysitter..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top