Gift for CFI?

Arranged for my Commercial CFI to have some time in a Lake amphib that I sold, put a huge smile on his face, he did a bit (100 hrs or so) of instruction in one some 30+ years ago. Called me up next day to tell me he even dreamed about flying a seaplane all night after that.
Not big on buying bottles and such, but try to arrange for fun rides/experiences for instructors. When I was flying off the IMC hours, took my CFII to NW TN to visit a mutual friend of ours instead of bumming around FL - that sort of thing. Doesn't feel like a tip (and it's not), but just a little something to brighten up the day.
Don't have anything against giving presents, but I hate picking them. "Oh, honey, thank you so much for the wonderful present!" "Sure! What did I pick for you this Christmas?" - that's me.
 
Tony_Scarpelli said:
I wonder what the FAA thinks on the matter?
Click to expand...

Why? Who cares? We need another Chief Counsel opinion like we need a hole in the head.

They have no magic crystal ball that shows them the real-world results of their lawyers legislating from a word processor, nor do they publish hard data backing any of the decisions that office makes.

See recent EAA/YE decision. Hunt hard for anything other than "we're scared, but we aren't smart enough to say anything other than 'double the flight hours of a Commercial certificate candidate'".

You won't find a rational risk taker who knows how to measure the outcome and adapt and says they'll do so, anywhere in any government organization except the Fed. And their track record isn't exactly stellar.
 
Wow. Lots of cheapskates around here. In a world in which everyone understands AMUs except when paying CFIs, I don't think they're overpaid. I don't tip, but I do round up hours when appropriate. I.e. when I had my BFR last week, I carved out 2.5 hours on the schedule. Flight time was 1.1 hours, ground was about an hour, and .4 was preflight and just talking about airplanes. I just put 1.4 in for ground to pay the guy for the full chunk of time that I reserved. He did well and treated me with respect.
 
SkyHog said:
Not my problem that some CFIs can't negotiate a proper rate. Since the customer is paying for the rental as well, the CFI should be able to negotiate a rate much closer to the actual asking rate, forcing the school to charge the proper rate for the airplane.
Click to expand...

If CFIs crashed airplanes as often as IT mangers crashed computers, the pay would be better.
 
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nddons said:
Wow. Lots of cheapskates around here. In a world in which everyone understands AMUs except when paying CFIs, I don't think they're overpaid. I don't tip, but I do round up hours when appropriate. I.e. when I had my BFR last week, I carved out 2.5 hours on the schedule. Flight time was 1.1 hours, ground was about an hour, and .4 was preflight and just talking about airplanes. I just put 1.4 in for ground to pay the guy for the full chunk of time that I reserved. He did well and treated me with respect.
Click to expand...
CFIs are one of the most underpaid professions around in my opinion. Just remember, when we were newbies, our lives were in their hands. We need to take care of them! :yes:
 
Clip4 said:
If CFIs crashed airplanes as often as IT mangers crashed computers, the pay would be better.
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My computers don't crash. One hasn't been rebooted in over 1600 days.

Problem is most IT execs buy the ooh-shiny shrink-wrapped expensive stuff they read about in CIO magazine instead of believing their staff when they say, "What you're asking to do isn't simple. I can design something to do that and deploy it in three months if you pull me off of everything else you have me doing."

If I had a nickel for every piece of software that claimed to do things it can't, and certainly can't do reliably, I'd have retired in my early 30s and own a G5.

Lets not even go into the quality level of software across the board. 300-500 patches a year for an operating system is completely unacceptable in any other industry. If the operating system isn't stable, the code running on the OS certainly won't be. House of cards.

And yet... the bosses keep sending the checks to the vendor. Seems like a whole lot of someones at multiple customer sites might want to stop payment for faulty product or start a Class Action suit, if they had the balls.

As long as coders don't reuse code known to work, review their work carefully enough they're not leaning on the crutch of instant patching available via the Internet, and not documenting squat... I will always have a job.

I have no argument that it's a stupid job. If the products did half of what they claim to do, I'd be doing something else for a living.

This week I measured... 85% of my time was taken up by administrative trivia that has nothing to do with what I was hired to do. Assuming a 40 hour work week... Laughable... That means the company is so disorganized they paid a huge amount of money for 6 hours of real work and 34 hours of meetings, useless paperwork, travel time to sites where the gear has the ability to be remotely controlled but they're just now spending the money to attach to the network, responding to real or perceived outages that were mis- routed, and reloading a service I've been waiting for another department to open a handful of firewall ports for over a month to permanently fix a problem.

Last week the new parent company announced that every server install will require six more documents per machine. We have 2 staff on the Linux side. There's no plan to staff appropriately. We provided and our boss agreed, that any new servers requested will have a three week lead time if it's an emergency request, no timeframe guarantee for non-emergency requests.

But hey, the company laid off the only Jr staff member in the group to not just have a profitable quarter but to set a record.

Fine by me. As long as the checks keep cashing I'll continue plodding along. I've learned in 20 years there isn't any point in killing yourself to be laid off next quarter. "Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part."

The parent company bought us because we were fast and could do something they wanted to do much much cheaper than they. Then they decided to mandate we do business the same way they did, when it was costing them too much. Anyone else see the inevitable train wreck coming? LOL...

Total culture clash. The exec that made the deal made $3.5M as a cash bonus, not including equity. No performance metrics tied to it. Dude is laughing all the way to the next train wreck and bonus day.

Modern IT is a case-study in Ponzi schemes. I don't argue that at all. Very few companies know if their IT investment is making them money, saving them money, or losing them money. Retail industry seems to be the closest. They actually know if their tech is hurting their bottom line. Telecom also. Outages are engineered away from customers in telecom.

Desktop? Everyone is so used to it being perennially broken, CIOs build massive "help desk" infrastructure to manage the brokenness. And giant "ticket systems" to handle the never-ending panic and frustration of system users.

My litmus test has always been, "Can the entire IT staff go on vacation for a week and the business continue to function?" If not... You're doing it wrong.
 
Sheesh! Woudn't "not so much" have conveyed the same message?

denverpilot said:
My computers don't crash. One hasn't been rebooted in over 1600 days.

Problem is most IT execs buy the ooh-shiny shrink-wrapped expensive stuff they read about in CIO magazine instead of believing their staff when they say, "What you're asking to do isn't simple. I can design something to do that and deploy it in three months if you pull me off of everything else you have me doing."

If I had a nickel for every piece of software that claimed to do things it can't, and certainly can't do reliably, I'd have retired in my early 30s and own a G5.

Lets not even go into the quality level of software across the board. 300-500 patches a year for an operating system is completely unacceptable in any other industry. If the operating system isn't stable, the code running on the OS certainly won't be. House of cards.

And yet... the bosses keep sending the checks to the vendor. Seems like a whole lot of someones at multiple customer sites might want to stop payment for faulty product or start a Class Action suit, if they had the balls.

As long as coders don't reuse code known to work, review their work carefully enough they're not leaning on the crutch of instant patching available via the Internet, and not documenting squat... I will always have a job.

I have no argument that it's a stupid job. If the products did half of what they claim to do, I'd be doing something else for a living.

This week I measured... 85% of my time was taken up by administrative trivia that has nothing to do with what I was hired to do. Assuming a 40 hour work week... Laughable... That means the company is so disorganized they paid a huge amount of money for 6 hours of real work and 34 hours of meetings, useless paperwork, travel time to sites where the gear has the ability to be remotely controlled but they're just now spending the money to attach to the network, responding to real or perceived outages that were mis- routed, and reloading a service I've been waiting for another department to open a handful of firewall ports for over a month to permanently fix a problem.

Last week the new parent company announced that every server install will require six more documents per machine. We have 2 staff on the Linux side. There's no plan to staff appropriately. We provided and our boss agreed, that any new servers requested will have a three week lead time if it's an emergency request, no timeframe guarantee for non-emergency requests.

But hey, the company laid off the only Jr staff member in the group to not just have a profitable quarter but to set a record.

Fine by me. As long as the checks keep cashing I'll continue plodding along. I've learned in 20 years there isn't any point in killing yourself to be laid off next quarter. "Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part."

The parent company bought us because we were fast and could do something they wanted to do much much cheaper than they. Then they decided to mandate we do business the same way they did, when it was costing them too much. Anyone else see the inevitable train wreck coming? LOL...

Total culture clash. The exec that made the deal made $3.5M as a cash bonus, not including equity. No performance metrics tied to it. Dude is laughing all the way to the next train wreck and bonus day.

Modern IT is a case-study in Ponzi schemes. I don't argue that at all. Very few companies know if their IT investment is making them money, saving them money, or losing them money. Retail industry seems to be the closest. They actually know if their tech is hurting their bottom line. Telecom also. Outages are engineered away from customers in telecom.

Desktop? Everyone is so used to it being perennially broken, CIOs build massive "help desk" infrastructure to manage the brokenness. And giant "ticket systems" to handle the never-ending panic and frustration of system users.

My litmus test has always been, "Can the entire IT staff go on vacation for a week and the business continue to function?" If not... You're doing it wrong.
Click to expand...
 
wabower said:
Sheesh! Woudn't "not so much" have conveyed the same message?
Click to expand...

Doesn't work in meetings... Actually neither simple statements of fact nor a full 20 page glossy report works on those who have already made up their minds that they know how Enterprise-class computers work, because they're the boss and they have an iPad. ;)

This year I'm in detail mode. Next year I'll switch back to, "$625K for hardware and it'll take three months, and I can tell by the look on your face that we're not going to do it right, so plan for $1.3M over three years and a lot of wasted time spent falling behind the competition." ;)
 
I don't mean there, I mean here. The unibomber wrote shorter stuff.

denverpilot said:
Doesn't work in meetings... Actually neither simple statements of fact nor a full 20 page glossy report works on those who have already made up their minds that they know how Enterprise-class computers work, because they're the boss and they have an iPad. ;)

This year I'm in detail mode. Next year I'll switch back to, "$625K for hardware and it'll take three months, and I can tell by the look on your face that we're not going to do it right, so plan for $1.3M over three years and a lot of wasted time spent falling behind the competition." ;)
Click to expand...
 
Some CFI's only get paid when they fly. Some are paid per diem. I've had the advantage and disadvantage of each. Whatever they get, it isn't what the customer is billed. It's the same thing as your auto repair shop or your aircraft maintenance. Shop rates per hour is not given straight to the mechanic. Then again, I can buy a 6 of beer for what the local bar charges me.
I've known CFI's with part time or a second full time job. I've known them sharing an apartment just to meet expenses. They drive rattrap cars with 200k miles on them.
I'm not into supplementing their income but there is nothing wrong with buying them dinner or a gift. Mine have gotten custom polos, lunch/dinner, a ride in my plane, memberships... A gift can be anything you think they will appreciate. And there is nothing wrong with that.
I have also bought my auto repair shop donuts, muffins, and coffee.
 
I can say from the experience of having to give up being a CFI in 2008 that CFI' do not get paid that much. Losing all the students I had to a semester break forced me to spend all the residual cash I had. Ended up breaking my apartment lease, quitting the "job," moved myself back to my parents house, consulted a bankruptcy attorney to find out it would only make things worse, and then getting a full-time cable tv installer job just to survive.

I have gotten my Bachelor's degree and changed to a different job in the mean time but have yet to instruct again. All this experience has told me that CfI's are far from we'll off financially.

I have been trying to get a part-time CFI job locally again with no success. Life is rough for CfI's.

David


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
 
I've been given a few gifts back when I was actively instructing...

$40 to Red Robin
$200 to a fancy steakhouse
Wristwatch
Mini keg of beer
Handmade scarf

I've appreciated them all, just like I've appreciated all my students and the thrill of teaching them to fly.
 
I gave my CFI a beer stein I picked up in Germany, a real one from a bar, not one of those fake looking tourist things.
 
SkyHog said:
Not my problem that some CFIs can't negotiate a proper rate. Since the customer is paying for the rental as well, the CFI should be able to negotiate a rate much closer to the actual asking rate, forcing the school to charge the proper rate for the airplane.
Click to expand...
:rofl::rofl::rofl:

:nonod:
 
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