Initial CFI failure rate

Check out Steve Krog’s monthly column in the July 2023 edition of EAA’s Sport Aviation magazine.
 
Clip4 said:
FAA please kick your DPEs in the rear and start failing more applicants. The poor quality of new CFIs is glaring.
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I'm a student. What are the shortcomings that you are seeing?
 
Baked Potato said:
I'm a student. What are the shortcomings that you are seeing?
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You mean like sending applicants to check rides that don't have the minimum experience requirements and glaringly obvious gaps in knowledge.

Things I have seen...
Logging Cross countries that don't meet the requirements for a Cross Country.
Not logging all the experience required, like night Take-offs and landings to a full stop.
Sending an applicant for a check ride that doesn't have a student pilot certificate.
With also means they have been soloing without one.
Sending applicants to check rides than can't figure out a Magnetic heading from a True coarse.
Sending applicants to a check ride that can't figure out a Wind Correction angle(they can use any kind of calculator they want)
Sending applicants to check rides that can't even describe the required maneuvers, let alone fly them without assistance.
Sending applicants to check rides that don't have basic emergency procedures memorized, they aren't' going to be using a checklist when the cockpit is filled with smoke or on fire.

I am sure there is more.

Brian
CFIIG/ASEL
 
The FAA was performing all CFI initials. The DPE's started crying, and they wanted to do the initials. With the FAA being understaffed with GA Ops Inspectors and office managers not wanting their Inspectors doing certification checks, the checks were turned over to the DPE's.

And here's your results. :rolleyes:
 
brcase said:
You mean like sending applicants to check rides that don't have the minimum experience requirements and glaringly obvious gaps in knowledge.

Things I have seen...
Logging Cross countries that don't meet the requirements for a Cross Country.
Not logging all the experience required, like night Take-offs and landings to a full stop.
Sending an applicant for a check ride that doesn't have a student pilot certificate.
With also means they have been soloing without one.
Sending applicants to check rides than can't figure out a Magnetic heading from a True coarse.
Sending applicants to a check ride that can't figure out a Wind Correction angle(they can use any kind of calculator they want)
Sending applicants to check rides that can't even describe the required maneuvers, let alone fly them without assistance.
Sending applicants to check rides that don't have basic emergency procedures memorized, they aren't' going to be using a checklist when the cockpit is filled with smoke or on fire.

I am sure there is more.

Brian
CFIIG/ASEL
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Alright, that makes me feel better about my school!
 
Doc Holliday said:
The FAA was performing all CFI initials. The DPE's started crying, and they wanted to do the initials. With the FAA being understaffed with GA Ops Inspectors and office managers not wanting their Inspectors doing certification checks, the checks were turned over to the DPE's.

And here's your results. :rolleyes:
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Good news is I was in the generation where inspectors were doing all initials…I was an ace instructor from the beginning. :rolleyes:

Of course, there were no inspectors in the East Coast region qualified to examine me, so I was a special case. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
 
Baked Potato said:
I'm a student. What are the shortcomings that you are seeing?
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Basically lack of aeronautical knowledge and instructional skills:

1. No integrated instruction
2. Low knowledge of basic aerodynamics.
3. Inability to adequately explain and demonstrate maneuvers both preflight and during flight.
3. Improper improper student evaluation and performance correction.
4. Not teaching proper trim use, stabilized approaches, poor airspeed control.
5. Poor ADM and inability to instruct ADM.
 
Come down here to central TX and I can train you up proper. I am the best CFI I’ve ever met and can make you the best pilot in the world. Most CFIs can’t even explain how planes fly (hint it’s PFM not Bernoulli or Newton).
 
Clip4 said:
Basically lack of aeronautical knowledge and instructional skills:

1. No integrated instruction
2. Low knowledge of basic aerodynamics.
3. Inability to adequately explain and demonstrate maneuvers both preflight and during flight.
3. Improper improper student evaluation and performance correction.
4. Not teaching proper trim use, stabilized approaches, poor airspeed control.
5. Poor ADM and inability to instruct ADM.
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1) Input your name on the training checklist, so fully integrated
2) I know all about PFM
3) I will show you common student errors like egg shaped turns around a point
4) Trim? We can fly a 737 stabilized approach pattern.
5) What’s ADM?
 
MauleSkinner said:
Of course, there were no inspectors in the East Coast region qualified to examine me, so I was a special case. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
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I took my initial CFI with an FAA inspector. I did it in a glider and the inspector stayed on the ground and watched me from there. I passed and he asked me to take his young son up for a ride, which I did - my first passenger as a CFI. Those were the days . . .
 
dbahn said:
I took my initial CFI with an FAA inspector. I did it in a glider and the inspector stayed on the ground and watched me from there. I passed and he asked me to take his young son up for a ride, which I did - my first passenger as a CFI. Those were the days . . .
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Mine was glider as well…we had to train a couple of feds for future checkrides.
 
So it’s come full circle. Use to be the faa did all cfi rides, then they started having dpe’s give them. When I did mine they had a great racket going. You had to call the faa and they told you who you were going to. they had their little click. The faa wanted an 80 percent bust rate, so they got it. The dpe’s in there click loved it, they bust 80 percent, they get the recheck fee, the faa was happy and kept sending them cfi candidates. The guy I got had a reputation as an as...le, he proved it was well earned.
 
unsafervguy said:
So it’s come full circle. Use to be the faa did all cfi rides, then they started having dpe’s give them. When I did mine they had a great racket going. You had to call the faa and they told you who you were going to. they had their little click. The faa wanted an 80 percent bust rate, so they got it. The dpe’s in there click loved it, they bust 80 percent, they get the recheck fee, the faa was happy and kept sending them cfi candidates. The guy I got had a reputation as an as...le, he proved it was well earned.
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I'm not sure having an 80% failure rate is such a bad thing. Maybe it should be higher.

However it's being done, we seem to be churning out some lousy pilot candidates now, many of whom shouldn't even be taking a check ride.
 
dbahn said:
I'm not sure having an 80% failure rate is such a bad thing. Maybe it should be higher.

However it's being done, we seem to be churning out some lousy pilot candidates now, many of whom shouldn't even be taking a check ride.
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I agree that we are getting some lousy cfi’s, but i don’t think an arbitrary fail rate is the answer. More consistent dpe’s might be a good start. A few dpe’s explaining to the current cfi’s why they are failing candidates will go a long way. Any cfi that has more than one candidate turned away due to requirements not met, or bad paperwork should get a nice conference with the fsdo.
 
unsafervguy said:
I agree that we are getting some lousy cfi’s, but i don’t think an arbitrary fail rate is the answer. More consistent dpe’s might be a good start. A few dpe’s explaining to the current cfi’s why they are failing candidates will go a long way. Any cfi that has more than one candidate turned away due to requirements not met, or bad paperwork should get a nice conference with the fsdo.
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That reminds me of the, "What do you call the student with the lowest passing grade in medical school?"

"Doctor"

Students are being trained to pass the written exam by studying answer techniques and being prepared for check rides by performing to an "acceptable" passing standard. Something else is needed to incentivize both students and instructors to create a higher quality pilot than what's being currently produced.
 
unsafervguy said:
The faa wanted an 80 percent bust rate, so they got it. The dpe’s in there click loved it, they bust 80 percent, they get the recheck fee, the faa was happy and kept sending them cfi candidates.
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Yet people expect me to feign contrition when it comes to pretzeling a "lesson learned" from an 80pct part 61 ticket failure rate? gfto. Turns out "*shrugs* I mean everybody else did" or, "everybody under my command in 4,500 sorties came home alive, what you accomplish today?" is apparently not the correct answer according to the interview preppers.:fingerwag:

As I near mil retirement, too many funerals, and a dollar closer to the position of FU, it's become exponentially steeper a climb to keep the charade up. I feel like Red at the 30 year parole hearing....
:biggrin:




ETA: for the record, it was the double-i add on for me, not the much maligned -A initial. I was the dope who porked it on the add-on after surviving the Hunger Games on the initial. :p
 
@hindsight2020 I probably enjoy reading your posts more than anyone, like a fun word puzzle that I can figure out, but this one WTF are you trying to say dude?! Lol!
 
Anyone poor pilot can pass a checkride, and any good pilot can fail a checkride.
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
@hindsight2020 I probably enjoy reading your posts more than anyone, like a fun word puzzle that I can figure out, but this one WTF are you trying to say dude?! Lol!
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Thats my bad, i've been working on my monosyllabic, figured the memes are more relatable for the paint by number crowd on here. It's a work in progress admittedly, sorry about that.

At any rate, the punchlines behind the memes were: 1) im tired of keeping up the pretense of validating a specious narrative of meritocracy i dont believe in and privately consider beneath me, and 2) i was making a self-depracating joke about the delicious irony of passing a checkride 80pct fail, to turn around and bone up an add-on ride 90pct pass lol.
 
Kritchlow said:
Anyone poor pilot can pass a checkride, and any good pilot can fail a checkride.
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This is true. While Clip has a point about DPEs being too lax with standards, it is also a concern that the applicants and their recommending instructors don't care enough to try harder.

Seems like every day people post on Facebook that a CFI-applicant only needs a 2-year CFI for the checkride signoff. It's not an accurate statement. The culture of wanting everything to be easy and looking for a shortcut or loophole around every requirement doesn't seem like a solvable problem.

I once inherited a CFI-student that couldn't fly any of the commercial maneuvers that he had just taken a checkride on a few months earlier. Heck, there were some maneuvers he couldn't fly to private standards.
 
Do we have more terrible CFIs or just fewer good ones actually teaching? The airlines have been hiring like mad, I have to assume that creates a giant sucking sound (nee "better opportunities") all the way up and down the food chain.

There were garbo CFIs in the era of fed initials also.
 
I mean, this is what you get when you set incentives that foster transactional behavior. The day the airlines get that alarmed about quality control, they'll do ab initio.

There's also a bias here, given it's an avocational-centric forum. We find it foreign that there could be hordes of people who care nothing for the purism of handflying, or whatever attention to detail would be required to be good at something that doesn't pay that well in the aggregate. Fact is, there are in fact tons of people who see piloting just like a good chunk of women see "easy come easy go" vocations like nursing. I hear the same complaint from my wife about many of her "clock puncher/OT prospectors" peers at the hospital. Most people are mediocre (in the statistical meaning), they just want a means to a middle/upper-middle living without the drudgery and cost of either extended timeline of studies (med schools vis say NP/CRNA/PA school), or academic rigor they won't or are incapable of successfully negotiating.

I have plenty of coworkers in DoD land for whom this shtick is also just a means to an end. I know a dozen at least who went on to never touch an airplane the rest of their lives after they started collecting that active duty retirement check. It takes all kinds I suppose, but it doesn't shock me that a good chunk of people treat this vocation with that level of disengagement. Beyond those who try to really accelerate their timeline (ATP schools et al, the Gulfstream academy schemes of old, which gave us people way over their heads like Renslow), the barrier to entry is just not.that.rigorous. Which certainly invites these types to proliferate.

Some of us can be part of the solution, but you have to make flight instruction a serious conduit to a middle class living. It isn't in present circumstances, certainly not for me as a career primary flight instructor for over 12 of the 17 years I've been in the Service. I value my talent and find myself content in a long-term teaching capacity (it's repetitive indeed, and not for everybody), but it's just not valued in the civil sector the way the military has done for my family. I enjoy what i do but im not gonna start running a charity.
 
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unsafervguy said:
So it’s come full circle. Use to be the faa did all cfi rides, then they started having dpe’s give them. When I did mine they had a great racket going. You had to call the faa and they told you who you were going to. they had their little click. The faa wanted an 80 percent bust rate, so they got it. The dpe’s in there click loved it, they bust 80 percent, they get the recheck fee, the faa was happy and kept sending them cfi candidates. The guy I got had a reputation as an as...le, he proved it was well earned.
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The "80% bust rate" is a myth. What the FAA was doing is to have the DPE's more standardized on CFI evaluations and focusing on various areas that were found to be deficient.

The plan you speak of was initially started as a way to prevent CFI initials from all going to a few select DPE's who would give a Santa Claus check ride. The DPE's complained about the new FAA system (just as they did with ASI's doing initial rides) and complained even more because the FAA was doing heightened surveillance on DPE's doing initial CFI's. Again the focus was on standardization and identifying problem areas in CFI training. This created a higher workload on DPE's and also reduced the number of checks they could give (CFI initials when done correctly were consuming more time).

The DPE's ultimately won and the FAA reduced surveillance, so now we are back to DPE's churning out CFI's of what can be considered less quality. And to be fair, not all DPE's are doing this, but we all know who the easy DPE's are and who the thorough DPE's are. And the market lends itself that the easier DPE's are busier.

So here we are once again.
 
Doc Holliday said:
The FAA was performing all CFI initials. The DPE's started crying, and they wanted to do the initials. With the FAA being understaffed with GA Ops Inspectors and office managers not wanting their Inspectors doing certification checks, the checks were turned over to the DPE's.

And here's your results. :rolleyes:
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I’m waiting for my CFI initial. I reached out to two FSDOs. They’re telling me FAA no longer does initial CFI certification. Only through DPEs.
 
Clip4 said:
FAA please kick your DPEs in the rear and start failing more applicants. The poor quality of new CFIs is glaring.
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Perhaps once CFIs are getting paid more than the local McDonald’s worker, we’ll be more incentivized to provide valuable instruction.
 
Gordon Freeman said:
Perhaps once CFIs are getting paid more than the local McDonald’s worker, we’ll be more incentivized to provide valuable instruction.
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Well, the airlines rely on that cost shift in order to minimize their labor costs, FFD/WO/ACMI carriers are/were the other one. Look at the kerfuffle Republic is having right now with their training contracts; when the airlines take over the price-risk of training, things gets a lot less "living the dream" for the aspirants. So people will always prefer the system where they can treat certain jobs as disposable trash in order to grab at the proverbial ring (even though mathematically they can't all attain the same limited number of six figure+ 2 million dollar retirement paying US3+LCC jobs), and the qualitative results are predictable. Flight instruction finds itself in the unfortunate position of being at the end of that whip, especially when the aspirants don't feel they can attain the required hours to apply to their coveted airline job in a more expedient manner than crowding out their own compensation by all seeking to become CFIs for 1500 hours and then chucking it to the next sucker on the downline, never to touch a piston aircraft for "compensation" ever again.

I'm afraid when US airlines finally move into a sim-only, MPL style, ab initio like Europe, US primary inflight instruction (and much of the legacy fleet) will go the way of the syndicated TV show writer when internet streaming showed up, with the caveat that the former never got paid well in the first place.
 
Gordon Freeman said:
Perhaps once CFIs are getting paid more than the local McDonald’s worker, we’ll be more incentivized to provide valuable instruction.
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It's true that a CFI can't really support a family on typical pay. I am not full time, but if I were, I would make about 60K a year. For me it is a great retirement job, and I can work as much or as little as I want.

But I am bothered by your comment that the amount we are paid would make a difference in providing valuable instruction. My signature is in more than 600 logbooks. I sure hope every single pilot I trained found the instruction valuable, and that it has contributed to safe flying.
 
Gilbert Buettner said:
It's true that a CFI can't really support a family on typical pay. I am not full time, but if I were, I would make about 60K a year. For me it is a great retirement job, and I can work as much or as little as I want.

But I am bothered by your comment that the amount we are paid would make a difference in providing valuable instruction. My signature is in more than 600 logbooks. I sure hope every single pilot I trained found the instruction valuable, and that it has contributed to safe flying.
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That's because you've never had to confront Maslow's Hierarchy of needs when proffering those signatures, by your own admission (my emphasis). Or as we call it, speaking from the cheap seats. It's ok to have a hobby, but you don't get to chastise (not without pushback that is) those trying to make a living whereby your very presence as someone who can afford to do it for play money, undercuts their ability to derive a livelihood.

Don't misunderstand, it's not unique to flight instruction, I can say the same thing about airline pilots protective of their job space against military retirees, visa holders, and things like the repeal of the Jones Act or the introduction of cabotage.

In short, we're all rent-seekers in life. Which is why you're not gonna catch me finger wagging at anybody who may be accused of "quiet quitting" over low pay. Rational incentives do exist, the "Needs-Poor" (in the context of Maslow) don't owe anybody prompt service.
 
hindsight2020 said:
That's because you've never had to confront Maslow's Hierarchy of needs when proffering those signatures, by your own admission (my emphasis). Or as we call it, speaking from the cheap seats. It's ok to have a hobby, but you don't get to chastise (not without pushback that is) those trying to make a living whereby your very presence as someone who can afford to do it for play money, undercuts their ability to derive a livelihood.
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It's not my hobby. It's a change of employment that occurred when I stopped working full time in broadcasting and became a full-time flight instructor, because I was able to start taking social security and earn about the same without having to drive two hours a day to and from my job.

It's not play money, but yes, I have reduced my hours to enjoy some of the benefits of being partly retired. Travel, relaxation, and since you quote Maslow, a bit of self-actualization.

My flight instruction takes NOTHING away from those trying to make a living at it. If anything, I mentor some of the new CFIs where I work, and there is never a time when a lesson I teach reduces their flying schedule. I believe they are better instructors because I am still working with them, but I also know not a single one (of the other five) plans to make flight instruction their long-term occupation.
 
Gordon Freeman said:
Perhaps once CFIs are getting paid more than the local McDonald’s worker, we’ll be more incentivized to provide valuable instruction.
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I think people who use the excuse that they will do a better job if they got paid more will continue to do a lousy job no matter how much they got paid.

My observation aligns with the OP...I can't help but feel there is a huge percentage of flight instructors that just aren't any good. And it explains why so many students take 100+ hours to get their private pilot certificate. Many of them try hard but can't seem to teach; many are really incompetent and don't know much; some can't fly any better; many just don't care. Just about all of them are airline bound.

I spoke to a few recent CFIs who told me they did not have to teach during their practical. It was mainly flying scenarios and testing judgment. I was amazed. Within the last month, I had a chance to speak with a DPE who told me that the PTS doesn't require the CFI candidate to teach anything except for a single in-flight maneuver. The rest is evaluation of "instructional knowledge". I told him that he could evaluate that by making them teach. And to use teaching scenarios instead of ordinary flying scenarios. But he didn't want to do anything the PTS doesn't require.

During my CFI checkrides I had to teach no less than 3 ground topics. I taught or demonstrated all the maneuvers. Now, it seems, which the exception of teaching one maneuver, all the candidate has to do is to do the equivalent of a commercial checkride.
 
Gordon Freeman said:
I’m waiting for my CFI initial. I reached out to two FSDOs. They’re telling me FAA no longer does initial CFI certification. Only through DPEs.
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As a prospective CFI aren’t you supposed to be current on aviation training and testing procedures? The prosecution rests.
 
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MauleSkinner said:
Perhaps CFIs who need to get paid more in order to do their job properly should go to work at McDonald’s.
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This 100%.

It's also troubling that someone wouldn't realize the value of their non-cash compensation as a CFI, particularly if this brand new 250h CFI fancies themselves a future professional airline pilot that needs 1500h.

Stiffing your unsuspecting student with shi**y quality instruction because you're not incentivized enough with your take-home pay just showcases your own ignorance. You should recognize that poor sap student is the only reason your broke as* has a chance in hell of achieving your dreams of reaching the airlines, because without their financial subsidy of paying for the plane and your hourly-rate you wouldn't be able to make it on your own. Making a poor job of it and shafting the student just illustrates your own immaturity and a lack of awareness about the situation.

Coincidentally such work ethic would feel right at home at McDonalds.
 
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