Oh I forgot about another old CFI who I flew with a bit. He had a “great time” with girl students when he was a CFI at another once-very-GA-busy airfield around the corner in the 1980s. He once bought with him an envelope with loads of girls in bikinis (who apparently used to lounge around his school like that on hot days) commenting on them variously favourably. He clearly had fond memories of the “good old days”… I liked him as an instructor though. Well, he passed my PPL checkride! I was supposed to fly to some phone tower on top of a hill and we couldn’t find it because we ended up directly above it. He was one of the old guys who managed to get himself grandfathered from a basic PPL (who could get paid for training ~ 30 years ago, without a CPL etc) to a BCPL to being able to teach and examine the PPL and the IMC Rating without ever having any instrument training himself (yes there was apparently a route).
I tend to take these “testimonials” with a grain of salt. It’ a nice and “logical” story, but how many girls has that “CFI” actually flirted up like that? Or has he just heard the story elsewhere and passes it on? Maybe he leaned over once and accidentally touched her knee? It’s easy to amplify stories like that.
Sure, although over several years you get an awful lot of students, and in flight training you spend some 50 hours in very close proximity to the other person. Obviously female instructors potentially have the same problem – only much worse because nearly all the “others” are males.
I had a taxi driver the other day who was telling me that the best phase of his life was when he was still doing night shifts. He would oh-so-often pick up girls driving home alone from some club and then…
That is definitely true, here in the UK if you do the “club closing time” shift e.g. 3am. My next door neighbour did that…. but yeah off topic 
It’s not wholly irrelevant because it is probably a factor which attracts some of the more dubious characters in the first place. Most professions are self selecting by character profile. So a business which requires conning people (e.g. solar heating) is going to draw in a load of crooks. In the 1970s and 80s I used to make temperature controllers for solar heating and almost all my customers were crooks. Some went to jail, for fraud, assaulting customers, and one for stealing a house (not kidding). IMHO aviation has an overly “romantic” image to it, in the minds of people who watched too many Bogart and Baccall films with a DC3 in the background…
Well, i was a night shift taxi driver for 5 years, and nothing like that ever happened, and i was a good looking 25 yo. Tales! (But i did drive an American lady through Europe, but that’s really off topic)
I did drive a taxi from 20 to 25 and I can tell you no such thing happened regularly. Yes, the drunk 50 year old overweight divorcee occasionally wanted you to join her for “tea”, but that was about it. But then there was that one time with the hot 30 year old blonde… 
Maybe we should open a taxi driver topic then … I had so many funny, and not so funny, stories as a taxi driver ….
Interesting thread! Some thoughts from me (as an FI and FE) in no particular order:
My absolute pet hate is instructors that ride the controls. It is absolutely unforgivable, destroys the students confidence and is a mark of an instructor who is under confident him/herself. A clear handover / takeover of control is essential.
I’ve been fortunate to have a very good PPL instructor. An older, military man who was not about what he was, but what you were about. I was extremely motivated to learn, and always prepared well for the flight. He was impressed by my way of calling out and systematically doing all required actions during flight. So I became impressed by myself too. A bit too impressed. Rather than doing checks, I sometimes started just calling them out. So one day, in the C152, I said ‘fuel on’ and moved my hand towards that hidden lever between the seats, but not touching it. On short final, the engine stopped… And, while floating and making the runway he calmly told me to do my checks more properly.. Kind of interesting that he knew exactly when to close that gauge My checks are real checks ever since..
I don’t have a lot of experience as an instructor, but there is one thing I try to avoid to do at all cost, and that is too touch the controls. It is a scientific fact that pilots fly by feel. The force feedback is everything. So taking the controls and letting the students ‘follow through’ or whatever the term is, is completely useless IMHO. Of course there may be circumstances that require a bit of input, but this should be really be a last resort. You should give the pilot every opportunity to feel the behaviour of an aircraft. I’ve had a few students that flew for the first few hours without me ever touching the controls and I talked them through their flying. You should see the mental boost it gave them after telling them ‘’ you do realize I haven’t touched anything yet". Very motivating for them.
I would sign all of that!
I remember how good I felt after my first flight, when the instructor let me taxi, take-off, fly and land … without touching the controls once. He even let me do a bad landing, but he talked me down in a way that I didn’t land on the nosewheel. That evening I was so proud! Then, some hours later I flew ith that CFI who was scared and nervous … and after one hour so was I …
The main problem: All of these guys can fly … for themselves. But they are no teachers, they have never learned how to really instruct somebody. So it all depends on luck .. you might find one that is a friendly character and a natural teacher.
And that’s really hard. I am only a CRI, but for a while I did many BFRs and Piper, Robin and Cessna checkouts. Then one day my best friend whom I know since we were kids wanted to do the BFR with me. He was already a bit tense, becasue he knew that I had much more experience than him, although I tried to nit let him feel that. Big Brother syndrome, I’d say….
Overflying a local airport with a 1,3 km runway in 5000 feet i had a brilliant idea which i regret to this day. I pulled the key out of the ignition and put it in my shirt pocket, smiled at him and asked “and what would you do now”. I felt completely safe, and I think we were, directly overhead the airport. But my friend really got scared, because he had never flown engine out … it actually scared the shit out of him, and he didn’t forgive me for a long time, and to this day he does his BFRs with other people, which I regret. No apologies helped.
I really underestimated how much that stuff can scare an unexperienced pilot. Maybe because I had done the same thing to my wife earlier. She had even less experience, but she’s cooler than me. “What are you trying to prove”, she went, “you want me to land at that airport below? Okay…”. I think her blood pressure was not raised 1 percent. It was also because I was used to that stuff. The American military pilots I had flown with did that kind of stuff all the time… and I think it was a good training.
Balliol wrote:
My absolute pet hate is instructors that ride the controls. It is absolutely unforgivable, destroys the students confidence and is a mark of an instructor who is under confident him/herself. A clear handover / takeover of control is essential.
I agree. Last year I took a low flying course. The instructor assigned to me did that all the time – he didn’t say anything I just noticed that the controls moved without me doing anything. Once during a flare! I certainly don’t have perfect flying technique, but when you have 600+ hours you should be trusted with being able to land the aircraft well enough that the instructor can tell you about any imperfections rather than taking the controls.
Interested: what (and where) is a low flying course?
That’s a curiosity I share.
And to essentials: during flight the perfect instructor just sits next to the student, saying little and doing less – especially around short skirts – myself wanted pre- and postflight briefing above all. But I found few instructors (and examiners) to be good at explanations, at whatever stage, which may explain how long I took to get the ticket.
