I have been quite lucky myself with good instructors. I’ve had both the young starting their career type and the other end of the spectrum too. The young instructors I had were enthusiastic and made the lesson fun and enjoyable. The older type were full of experience and also made the lesson fun in a different ways. I’m still friends with a lot of them today.
One story stays in my mind from my PPL training couple of years ago:
On a moderate crosswind day while doing circuits and after 2 go-arounds, the instructor asked me if I wanted him to demonstrate a good crosswind landing. I said yes, also because I was a bit stressed and needed a break. The instructor took control and proceeded with doing a pretty bad bouncy landing. On downwind he said “That was more of a go around than a touch and go… and please erase that landing from your memory as that was really bad technique…”.
So I guess the moral here is that instructors don’t need to be sky gods, but other qualities are more important, like knowing the right teaching technique, listening to their student, being humble and like someone else said making it fun.
Patrick wrote:
I prefer flying with the younger ones at my school because they don’t come with that sort of “attitude” that the older ones seem to have and which makes it very unpleasant to fly with them
I found the complete reverse when I was training for the UK PPL/IR. My instructor was a similar age to me at that time (early 30’s) and had to demonstrate his “wit” and superior knowledge at every opportunity. This went on until I felt I’d had enough. I then spotted an article in Pilot magazine, about a pilot who had successfully obtained his IR under the tutelage of a certain instructor. This was an older gent who was the complete opposite of the "mouth almighty " I had been suffering under. After a chat I decided to switch horses and I never looked back. My confidence restored I passed my flying test within 3 months of switching and used this instructor/examiner for the next 27 years for my renewals until he felt it was time to retire. You need to have instructors with compatible personalities.
At least I was taught those two things but my tale is not about my experience but of a friend of mine who went on a residence course to a certain European country in order to do their PPL in 4 weeks. The only problem was the instructor. He was young and insisted on partying hard every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So guess what. No flying on Friday, Saturday and Sunday as the guy was still over the limit for flying. Imagine that; you pay for block training but because of the instructor, you can only fly 4 out of 7 days….
The company had the audacity to suggest my friend book another 3 weeks to complete the PPL. Pointing out the obvious – that the course could have been completed in the allocated time had the instructor not decided to party so much – was too much for the old owner to comprehend….
Good
1. In my first lesson my PPL instructor let me pull the 152 out of the hangar alone, do all the preflight checks (he just told me what to look) for, let me taxi the main taxiway up and down three times without any assistance and then let me take-off, fly and land – without touching the controls ONCE, just explaining to me what I should do in a calm and professional way. After ten hours I flew solo, … the whole PPL including the theory took me 8.5 weeks. That first flight felt so great, it gave me all the confidence I needed.
2. The same instructor showed me how to spin and recover the 152 after only 5 hours of flight time. He showed it to me once and then I did the whole thing without him helping. It was scary for a beginner, but I also felt great afterwards. I KNEW that I could recover from a spin.
3. On the day of my IFR checkride we had up to 40 knots of wind (on the ground!), some turbulence and many low clouds and showers. The examiner asked if “I wanted to fly at all” and when I agreed to do itt he let me fly to the next controlled airport, let me do two approaches and told me to fly home alone … The whole thing took less than one hour, one ILS, one NDB approach (on which he let me read the bearing of the GPS (“I see what you are doing but that’s how i would do it”) and when he got out he just said “good job, you passed…”.
BAD
1. One of my fist instructors who had to check me out for the first solo almost panicked when we flew through rain showers and always took control himself (not IMC, in very good visibility!)… one time we flew through a snow shower and he freaked out and I thought we would die …. The guy made me so nervous that I wouldn’t fly half as well as with his boss (above).
2. My wife’s first instructor (a guy who was later involved in a very bad fatal accident that was discusseed here) sent her on her first solo cross country … and later she asked me what she “should have done if the engine had stopped” … I learned that heir instructor had not practiced ANY emergency maneuver with her. Of course the same guy told her to “not touch the red buttton, or the engine would quit”. I had initially told my wife that I would not “play play flight instructor” while she was learning, becasue I didn’t want to start fighting with her CFI (and i knew it would happen). But the next day I told the school that either the Chief CFI (owner of the school and very good instructor) would fly with her from now on – or I would report it to the authority. Worked perfectly and she did the PPL in six months!
3. My IFR instructor, although a great pilot on his good days, would sometimes treat me like shit, yell at me, or say stuff like “are you too stupid?” And that was although I was an above average student for sure…. Until one day after we landed I made him such a scene .. well I guess he never forgot it. From that day I never again let a CFI treat me like I was a prisoner on parole or an idiot. The next guy (in my aerobatic training) i told to “stop it” right away, and he was clever enough to understad. But I still hear these stories. I friend of mine is doing his IFR in his own Cirrus at the moment and the other day he complained to me on the phone how “unfriendly the CFII” was, many times.
I just renewed my IR(R) and didn’t enjoy the examiner much:
He didn’t brief clearly. When it came to booking approaches, he told me to just book a radar vectored ILS. I asked “but don’t we need two, a non-precision approach as well?” and he just talked over me saying that if I really wanted to we could do the NDB procedure and then a procedural ILS, and that I’d probably fail. It wasn’t until we were in the air that I figured he intended to cover the non-precision approach with the unofficial (read non-existent) NDB approach to our home airfield.
He was rude about the aeroplane (he’s a lifelong PA28 fan, everything else is rubbish apparently).
More than once he asked me why I was changing heading – to which my answer was that the controller had told me to.
Continuing on the hearing theme, he then made me turn the radio up to a level that was uncomfortable for me and when I idented the ILS I had to turn it up to a level that was positively painful for me so that he could hear it.
Post-ILS and while still on with the radar controller at that airfield, he fiddled with my comm radios and, trying to be helpful, dialed up as standby a station that I had not planned to work until a bit later in the flight. I had to quickly re-dial the frequency I wanted so that I could request a change and transit a piece of Class D that was between us and the waypoint he’d just asked me to navigate to.
Doing the unofficial procedure into home field, he asked me to track a particular radial from a VOR and at the same time fly to the NDB. It isn’t possible to do both, because the NDB does not lie on that radial from the VOR. I kept following the radial, because that had been his first and clearest instruction regarding the procedure. As the ADF needle drifted off he said “turn or you’re going to fail”, I said “that’ll mean losing the radial” to which he replied “fly the radial and fly to the beacon!” – at which I kind of semi-exploded and said that I could do one or the other but not both. He snapped “fly to the beacon!” so I did that.
I passed. He was grumpy as hell about it. I won’t fly with him again.
Gosh; thanks for posting that.
Sounds like a nice guy… just what you want for a checkride: introvert, wouldn’t say boo to a goose, makes it all to easy so you feel guilty to get his signature 
He should go into a partnership with a “well known” guy I did some stuff with years ago; the two would get on like a house on fire
Aviation really drags them out of the woodwork…
You passed – good for 25 months
Watched it because you posted it.
I hope his video will help some student pilots.
I met only one FI who was not nice but many were more safety pilots than instructors that teach.
They could show the manoeuvers, made sure you bring the airplane back in one piece and are in for a chat.
But very few FIs I met could really dissect my shortcomings and explain me how to correct them in a manner that I easily understand.
Unfortunately the profession attracts some “unusual” personality types. That video (posted in another thread recently) is absolutely awful but I have seen similar and worse. One DPE from Florida, visiting the UK about 20 years ago, was nicknamed “Mr Two-Checkrides [insert surname]” because he failed almost everybody 1st time, by aggressively distracting them. He’s still out there, running a school there, according to google. My contemporaneous writeup of that event is hilarious but could never be published. My PPL checkride with him followed another with a colleague which was done in way sub-VFR conditions (rain so heavy you could not see the runway from the downwing leg; I refused to do it and did it the following day).
