Confessions of a new CFI

[szwinger]

I will say there are plenty of good CFI’s out there, but there’s an equal amount of bad CFI’s floating around. It doesn’t help that young kids are trying to hurry and get time for an airline job who have no interest in teaching. Those kinds of instructors do not put out a good product.

I find that some of the lower time CFI’s that I have experienced have been very good with avionics and iPad expertise. I don’t mean that as a slight. When I transitioned to the G1000 the few (two) CFIs that were working their way to the airlines were masters of the avionics. They were good with flying too but some of the higher time CFIs I’ve flown with struggle a bit with buttons and screens.

 

[billsgs126]

This. Often times, I train Private Pilot students to the Commercial standard . . .

I had almost 100 hours in gliders before interviewing a CFI to add -ASEL to my Private. I had already charted out the Part 61 minimum requirements for an Instrument rating and a Commercial as well as a route to obtain them in a bit over 150 additional hours. In small part by meeting those more stringent requirements as part of work on the Private.

Having a plan impressed the CFI. Of course we went over on hours because of a myriad of small factors. But we had a plan . . . and it held up until first contact with the enemy objective.

 

[RyanB]

I find that some of the lower time CFI’s that I have experienced have been very good with avionics and iPad expertise. I don’t mean that as a slight. When I transitioned to the G1000 the few (two) CFIs that were working their way to the airlines were masters of the avionics. They were good with flying too but some of the higher time CFIs I’ve flown with struggle a bit with buttons and screens.

I would tend to resonate with that. As I said, there are lots of good ones, and also plenty of bad ones. The ones who enjoy teaching and put their all into each lesson are the ones who stand out from the rest

 

[Albany Tom]

My first CFI was absolutely there to build time to get a job with the regionals. But he was also a kind and ethical guy. I told him I was there to learn to fly, and the ticket was secondary to that. He appreciated that, and one of his primary goals was to teach me the things I needed to know to avoid killing myself in the airplane. I wasn't special that way, that's just what he did. From random places in the pattern, and just flying from point A to B, he'd pull power to idle. If we were near the airport, the expectation was to land at idle. It was repeated until nose down to the attitude to best glide on the sound of the engine coming down was automatic. When we did slow flight and stalls, it slow flight to the point that you had to use rudder to keep the wings level, aileron would drop it, and stalls were to full break.

It didn't cost him any time or effort to do those things. I wasn't pushing him to get me to the position to take the checkride after X hours, and it was part 61 so there wasn't any school pushing us, either. None of the things he taught were any danger at all, and he was trained the same way.

My point with the ramble above is that I don't know that there's a good correlation between someone doing flight training as a stepping stone as someone that doesn't care about the job their doing.

 

[Ed Haywood]

I almost failed my PPL checkride 32 years ago because of a tendency to over study and "read ahead".

Having read all the PPL stuff, I had started reading about IFR. I found standard rate timed turns to be interesting. When the DPE put me on foggles and told me to do a 180, for some reason I tried to do it by time instead of the DG. This despite having never done that in training.

After failing several times to roll out on heading, he told me to take my foggles off and said "ok, I know you can fly the plane, what the hell are you doing?". After I explained I was doing a 1 minute timed turn, he said no, that's an IFR thing, just roll out on the DG heading. I said "oh, that's easy!"

Fortunately he gave me a mulligan.