The GOOD most instructors can teach basic flying.
The Bad most instructors teach people to fly aircraft but not to operate them.
The ugly Most instructors teach people to operate Lycoming or Continental engine as if it was a Gypsy Major.
RobertL18C wrote:
Basically as we progress, one lesson goes better or worse than the next one but we slowly oscillate along a learning curve.However, without this insight, it can create an illusion of causality.
This is interesting, and I can see how this happens
Learning in an aeroclub environment, as I did, is probably unique to France. The Brevet de Base allowed unsupervised solo, and the same aircraft would be flown before and after the PPL, so the licence was only a paper milestone. The training covered more than the minimum: radionavigation (VOR, DME) instead of dead reckoning, VFR on top, basic mountain flying, leaning, flight plans. I did the PPL on tailwheel, too.
However, there were also club-specific procedures, and nowadays I don’t think I’d easily conform to the oversight by club management and/or instructors. Things missing from my training:
Both instructors were university-level teachers, a perfect match for me in my early 20s, and highly committed. One focussed more on the physical aspect (stick and rudder), and the other on cognitive (knowledge, decision making), so they were complementary and well-balanced.
As an instructor, there are several operative levels: the flying, the teaching, and adapting to the student. Not all are necessarily present. My anecdotes:
Probably the best instructor was another US CFI, who it transpired was younger than me, had fewer hours, and had only been qualified 2 days. However, he was humble, emanated calmness, and genuinely cared about his students. He stayed with the school longer than the ATP-minimum 1500 hours, so I flew with him a few times before he finally got a GA job with the Sheriff’s Department (instead of an airline).
Unfortunately, for my PPL test, the examiner and I took an instant dislike to each other. Thankfully, he was fair, and I passed. Other than a few isolated instances of ignorance or ‘personality issues’, my general experience with instructors has been positive. My own attitude has changed, from passive and receptive on day one, to now viewing an instructor as someone you hire to fulfil a particular need.
I’ve had several experiences with instructors/examiners that sit in happily my mind.
2 main ones.
When I learned to fly, it all went very well, and I took to it all, except the final touchdown.
I was ready for solo around 6ish hours, except for my confidence in the touchdown and obviously my young instructors’ confidence too. He wasn’t wrong.
He told the CFI I’d be one of the earliest solo’s if we could just sort that.
It was at a big controlled field. But the big runways weren’t helping with anything. They just made circuits take longer.
The CFI, an older ‘Prickly’ type of chap said. “Right, you’re flying with me very early tomorrow!” I wasn’t really looking forward to it.
We got in the aircraft and he said to me, " Ok, what’s all this you can’t land crap"
I explained that actually, although I wasn’t getting it, I hadn’t done many hours so hadn’t done that many landings, but wasn’t improving noticably either.
I said I just felt I needed landings, the rest was wasting my time….lol….lol.
He had a word with ATC, the field was quiet.
Off we went.
Took off on, Rwy 11.
At 300ft or something, hooked a hard right onto land at Rwy 17. Kept rolling, straight out of 17, hard left onto 11, kept going hard round onto 17………what a scream. We were ignoring the thresolds and just landing, doing figure eights.
Such fun, and half a dozen landings in about as many minutes. With a big smile he got out, (engine running) and said you’re good to go. I’ll be in the tower, see you in 15 mins!!!!
When my South African licence became a pain in the UK (after flying my shared aircraft for about 10 years) I need an UK one. I had been granted dispensation for the exams except air law and radio licence practical.
I got that sorted and duly turned up for my check ride.
Fully unprepared, I was told it was going to be a full GFT.
Wtf……. Of course it was, but I’m too stupid to see that coming or to prepare.
There I am sitting looking at producing a GFT-passable plog, with drift and estimates etc.
I’d been hamming it together nicely with VOR’s for 10 years and forgotten what drift was.
The CFI came along, looked at me and said surely you’ve finished all that up by now, come on….off we go!
I hurriedly gathered up all my crap and like a scene from a movie, rushed out the door chasing him, dropping my chart, followed by pens, doubling back for a headset etc, you get the idea.
We took off and headed for our 1st waypoint.
I was settling-in and feeling happy it was kinda going my way.
He then said “ok….tell me when you see we’ve arrived”.
Clearly this was a hint. Lol
I started looking much harder and my calm was again dissolving.
“You need to see it”, he said.
“Yes, well I’m looking” I said.
“It’s down there!!!!” He said.
Not wanting to lie, I repeated, sorry “Sir but I can’t see it”.
I think we repeated that all once more.
“My controls” he said.
At that point he pulled the nose up a little, inverted us, and as we begun an inverted dive (fall), he was able to point out of the windshield and say…..“There, there it is, can you see it now?”
After the 1st genuine “No, I still can’t” we’d lost about 800ft, and I could just make out the boundary of the disused airfied he’d taken me to.
I’d never have found it, it was very vague.
He said “Well, you’ve done an excellent Nav, but you’ve put your turn point under the nose. That’s no good if you need to identify it. Don’t do that again”.
He gently rolled us level and gave it back to me.
He was so relaxed and comforting but with a huge Old-school personality that would draw respect from any descent person. It was a wonderful experience, that still amuses me to this day.
To finish, he gave me a divert and asked for an estimate. I guessed at 15 mins (kinda plucked it from thin air). We arrived bang-on.
He and I knew it was luck.
After we turned for home it went IMC in heavy rain. I said I was comfortable, so he said ok take me back and if you don’t mess up the flapless we’ll call it a day eh?
What a wonderful experience. The debrief was, “Clearly you can fly, and I was very comfortable the whole time. Keep that up please”
He signed my paperwork and was gone like a ghost. I never saw him again.
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Kahnemann and Tversky, who overhauled the officer training programme for the IDF, and designed the first MCC program for Delta (perhaps the first by a major airline?), had an interesting observation on learning progress and reversion to the mean. Basically as we progress, one lesson goes better or worse than the next one but we slowly oscillate along a learning curve.
However, without this insight, it can create an illusion of causality. Student has a crummy lesson, instructor shouts at her/him. Next lesson student improves, ergo shouting is good, when in fact it is purely a reversion towards the mean, with a possible overshoot on the positive side.
There was a time when air forces prided themselves on wash out rates, but Kahnemann and Tversky established that cadets who needed additional training (anathema in a wash out philosophy program) made better long term leaders/officers.
In general I would suggest the two major low cost regionals, Ryanair and EasyJet, have made enormous progress in producing excellent safety standards in flight deck and cabin crew, and also raising them for the region overall.
I haven’t have any unpleasant flight instructors but I knew some whose judgement was not always the best.
During training for my night rating I was going to do a solo cross-country. My instructor (who was F/O for a domestic airline) was working that day, but had the bright idea that as he was going to fly ESSA-ESSD and back in the evening, I could do a solo from our home field to ESSD and back and he would advise me on the club frequency using the second radio in his airliner. At the time I was not experienced or confident enough to just say no to less clever ideas from instructors.
Anyway, I filed my flight plan, preflighted and refueled the aircraft (a Cessna 172) and took off. After rotation there was a loud BANG in the aircraft. Then another BANG. The runway disappeared fast under me but as the aircraft seemed to handle normally, I decided to make a normal circuit and land. I advised the tower that I had a problem and needed to land again immediately. After landing I checked the aircraft, It turned out that I had not fastened the left wing fuel cap properly. The cap was secured by a chain and as the aircraft gained speed it repeatedly struck the wing surface. On the 172 the left wing root is next to the pilot’s head so the effect was that of having a drum next to your head.
I put the fuel cap on properly, took off again and the rest of the flight was uneventful. In arrival at ESSD my instructor told me that he almost had a heart attack as he could only listen to my conversation with the tower and not be able to do anything.
My wife almost had an instructor-induced crash while training for her PPL. Some distance away from our home field is a lake where we occasionally land in winter when it is covered by ice. During a dual training flight in a Cessna 152, the instructor told her to do a touch and go on the lake. Of course he had not properly checked the ice before but simply assumed it was ok. When the main wheels touched down they broke through the ice. It turned out there were two layers – a thin layer on top, a thick layer below and liquid water between them. Fortunately they managed to get airborne again. Had they slowed down too much they would never have been able to take off.
Wiltshire Flying School, at Thruxton, in 1964, was the best organised I’ve encountered. I didn’t realise that at the time. After going solo, my landings deteriorated. I was shocked when, after 3 circuits, my instructor said he could do nothing and cancelled the lesson. But I was soon back with a senior instructor. Took off, he took control, did a low circuit, and handed it to me set up for the approach.
No advice or comment until I done 3 poor landings.
Then he told me what to do, not why my landings
were bad. After a few good landings I was back to my usual instructor.
That was also the cheapest UK school by far.
I didn’t watch the video – what’s bad about it?
The only really bad instructor I’ve run into was the “chief pilot” at a certain SW France aeroclub, who twice panicked and grabbed the controls when I did perfectly reasonable things that just happened not to be his way of doing things, then (the second time) proceeded to gaslight me to the point where I was seriously ready to just give up flying for ever. Coming just after my accident, it took quite a while to get my confidence back.
I’ve had my fair share of 251-hour brand-new CFIs, especially when trying to stay current in the helicopter, but they weren’t actually bad, just inexperienced, with a distinct tendency to hang on to the controls when they shouldn’t.
I guess I was very lucky with my main instructors – for PPL+IR+CPL, PPL-H, and aerobatics, who were all highly experienced seen-it-all-before types who took everything calmly. I’ve flown with some other excellent instructors too.
I must have been lucky to have had pleasant instructors who taught me a lot, not only flying itself but also airmanship. But I’m starting to doubt myself now, because if there are so many awkward instructors around, I’m probably awkward myself and did not notice their strange behavior! My FI career was not that long, school quit, but I may have to check and call my students and apologize if appropriate. 
My PPL instructors contained more than the fair share (or maybe not) of personalities substantially into what today would be called sexually inappropriate behaviour.
Two of them got female students pregnant. One, aged about 55 at the time, I recently learnt, is believed to have served jail time for “something under 16” (the under-16 was obvious; the jail time wasn’t but he did vanish from GA). He explained to me the benefits of teaching in a PA28, one of which was the location of the fuel selector, on the far left and behind the student’s legs… Another, now dead, pulled out (during an IMCR lesson) an envelope with a load of photos of bikini-clad girls which he took (the photos; no information on anything else was provided) at a flying club at Biggin Hill, which was many years defunct by this time although like so much at the now-almost-dead (in terms of “club” activity) Biggin Hill seemed to be a hive of social activity in the 1970s, and gave me a commentary on each of them, amazingly remembering their names after all the years… I was paying some £150/hr for this and though it ridiculous but just got on with it and got the IMCR
Like most here I can remember my fair share of bad and good instructors.
One of the worst came about about 9 months after I got my PPL. The school that I was flying with and learnt with, was taken over by another school on the airfield.
I have the unfortunately luck to get a particular instructor from the new school to do a currency check on a TB9. He had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the fact that I trained with the wrong school and he decided that he just didn’t like anything about the way that I flew.
It didn’t start well when he gave out to me for checking the manual trim from end to end (like I’d be trained to do) as part of my pre-flight. He said I was going to wear it out doing that I should just check that it can move a bit! The next 40 minutes were painful as he attempted to change everything that I’d been taught. Actually this instructor had very little time on the TB9 as it was transferred over from the old school. I probably had more time on it at the time than he did! I do remember him telling he that he wouldn’t do a flapless landing in it as he heard it was very scary. (I did it as part of every checkout on the TB9 as with electrical flaps, if you had an electrical failure then the landing was going to be flapless!). I was determined not to be beaten by this instructor (my mistake – should have dumped him straight away). But after 4 more lessons and still not checked out, we agreed to part ways.
I got paired then with an instructor from the old school. The instructor from the old school just told me to “forget everything that the other instructor has told you. I’m not going to say anything. Just fly it like you were taught to and give me a good circuit.” We did one perfect circuit follow by another then a request for a glide approach followed by a flapless landing. I can still remember the relief after that as he said “There is nothing wrong with your flying. Just someone has ruined your confidence. Let’s work on building back the confidence. You can take it that this checkout is passed.”
On the good side, I’d a fantastic instructor for most of my PPL. I managed to get my first solo in just 7 hours (including 1 hour of an intro flight that wasn’t really a lesson). I’d no airborne time prior to that other than as a passenger in an airliner. I credit the short time to one simply fantastic instructor that I had (even thought he only did 2 of my lessons prior to my first solo). That’s why I pass very little notice of how long it takes someone to get their first solo. I think it’s all down to the instructors that you have. If I had different instructors I’m sure it would have taken me much longer.
I do remember one lesson in particular with this instructor. It was the instrument lesson where I had to wear the foggles. At first we did the 180 degree turn. After that we did some steep turns, and for the rest of the lesson we did very severe unusual attitude recovery all with the foggles. It’s the only time I’ve every truly experienced “the liens” and I had a bad case it for most of the lesson. When we landed and were having the debrief I was probably as white a snow. I remember thinking “That was hard. I’m going to have to work really hard to be able to do that well for the skills test.” I remember the instructor telling me that I’d done really well, and then me telling him that I found it really tough. He told me that I didn’t need to be able to do any of that for the skills test, only the level 180 degree turn, and that he’s only pushed me harder because I was able for it and he wanted to teach me some more. Everything in the lesson was positive. No criticism or complaints about mistakes. He was just pushing the student as far as they could handle building my skills and my confidence at the same time. A truly remarkable instructor that I’ve very grateful for having.
Maybe I should try and find out where he is today and send him a thank you card 22 years later
