IFR Instructors

I’m afraid I don’t fully understand your question. What do you mean by ‘test circuit’? What is ‘IFR system knowledge’?

Most IFR instructors over here are professional pilots due to the requirement to have 500 (?) hours of IFR time. Usually they fly jets so practical knowledge about IFR in small GA piston airplanes can be minimal.

Most IFR instructors over here are professional pilots due to the requirement to have 500 (?) hours of IFR time.

800 hours it used to be when I got my IR instructor rating, but not any more. I don’t know the exact figures, but quite a few of my own students are now IFR instructors themselves and all that was required (more or less) was their finished ATPL course and an instructor course. These guys never flew anything but a Pa28 and a Pa44 and most of the time with an instructor next to them… I would not let my son do his training with one of them, rather with a bored airline captain instead who at least knows a little bit about flying.

What Next, I would say neither one is ideal.

Thinking the airline guy with 1000s of hours might be better, yes but by how much? The practical knowledge of not just procedural but weather flight is of utmost importance. Over the years the knowledge Ive gain was by pushing outside my comfort zone to a gain a little more experience with each flight.. But always making sure that that step was not too big. 1000s of hrs above the clouds on autopilot is pretty useless to a guy flying a piston single that cant get above the weather and whose range is limited to decent alternates. Which is especially true in Europe.

One of the difficulties in this area is that the flight training business is not training people to be pilots i.e. to do a specific task.

An air force pilot is trained to fly a €100M plane and drop a bomb, etc, on somebody, and bring the plane back. The military have the training very polished. They also have the whole motivation package very polished – very unlikely to get a “Germanwings” there.

An airline pilot is also required to do a task on which he is not supposed to smash stuff up and get lost. The airlines have the training very polished too, with various safeguards which allow fresh kids with just the TR to sit in the RHS and not smash the thing up (well, not until the LHS goes to the toilet).

But a school is just a business. For best effect, the instructor has to gauge what the student wants to do later on. And that varies. The majority have no aim at all. Many want to get the PPL and tick the box and move on – maybe 50%? Then a lot obviously have insufficient funds for flying anyway, so what do you do?

What this leaves you is a small % of well funded and motivated individuals. The instructor needs to be able to spot these and give them the right sort of guidance. And this is IMHO the biggest area where the training business fails.

The IFR instructors I had were completely clue-less as to going from A to B. The best one had a fake ATPL and pretended to have a part time job flying a PC12 ferrying cheques for a bank. They all know how a VOR etc works, but we all know that stuff is about 1% of the required knowledge – especially as real IFR is 99.9% GPS.

What can be done about it, I have no idea. It’s no good saying one needs better instructors because the number of individuals who are going to use the training for real is quite small and you would never make enough money out of them.

Actually people like that would be much better served with freelance instructors but that is possible only in the USA. In Europe you can’t really do anything. It is possible to be a freelance IRI (for the student to get loggable time towards the CB IR) but almost nobody will go through the hoops to get qualified.

In Europe, practically, you can do mentoring only. That should be a lot easier but you still have the usual issues which you get in seat sharing. For example I could take somebody on a 5hr flight to Croatia but it can’t be just anybody. It has to be somebody who can fit into the plane, for a start! In reality, very little mentoring goes on.

One would hope that somebody doing an IR will be highly motivated and will be able to really use the training but that will be true only for people with access to both money and a suitable aircraft. A few years ago a sizeable group did an IR together (they got a discount on the ground school I believe) but most of them never used it afterwards.

most of my IR rating I had flown two instructors – one of them teaching IR for years but just recently started job for ATR/737 as F/O. The other guy was 777 captain for a very major airliner with extensive flight test history. Both were great and I can´t say there was too much difference – surprisingly. I think it´s more personal attitude related than the backround

This is exactly the reason I was so pleased to have the chance to train with Jim Thorpe of Rate One Aviation. Jim is entirely a private pilot who has extensive experience of GA IFR flying. (He was also a major player in the EASA process that led to the CB, IR and the EIR, so he has been supporting the cause in various ways for some time).

At the time I did my IR, he was in the process of setting up Rate One and looking for a guinea pig on which to try out his teaching skills. I jumped at the chance to put myself forward. It’s a long story that has been told elsewhere, but for various reasons we ended up living in hotels during much of the training, and in the evenings we got the chance to talk about how the IFR system works, from the practical perspective of someone who has been flying it for years. I suspect those evenings were every bit as valuable as the flight training, in their own way.

Here’s the relevant point, in partial defence of the training industry. Our original plan had been to try to incorporate some longer airways flights into the training. As it turned out, that’s not an efficient use of training time in terms of passing the skills test, because it uses up hours that are probably needed for polishing the instrument flying skills – hours that I badly needed! Given the way the EASA IR is structured around very precise execution of a pre-planned exercise, the most efficient way to pass the test is to bash the training routes. You can debate about whether the IR should be more like the FAA practical style of test, but we are where we are and training needs to reflect that.

So my answer to your original question is yes, talk to Rate One who deal exclusively in private IR training. But don’t expect much training in relation to practical use of your IR, at least not as part of the course itself, as there just isn’t time in an ab-initio IR course. You will, however, be working with experts in this field if you want to discuss practicalities, or to take extra training.

Some airline pilots are practical people who love aviation. I flew with a BA captain in a Tiger Moth last week, he is good. I have flown with others who are superb operators of private and business aircraft.

However there are some airline captains who have never filed a flight plan (ops do that for them), don’t know how to get the useful weather info (ops again) and are really only comfortable repeatedly flying the same route 2 crew with an ILS at each end.

I doubt any of the latter group are going to be instructing in GA.

Some GA instructor types are very limited in real life experience, logging thousands of hours in C152’s bashing the circuit, but some that fly King Airs single pilot on a regular basis.

It’s impossible to generalise, you just have to find the right sort and stick with them.

The problem is that “we” have mostly been through the sausage machine so we know what to look for if we did it all again.

But take yourself back to when you started. I was completely clueless. I asked the first instructor I flew with how many hours he had… it was 150. My jaw dropped when I heard that. SO many hours! Actually he was an excellent instructor. A few months later we had some ground school, on map projections. The guy walked in and said “my name is X and I am a CPL/IR”… you could hear the lower jaws in the room hitting the stops. He knew absolutely everything but was a poor instructor (had him for a bit of the IMCR). My best instructor was a guy who “dated” some “borderline-young” students and then had to vanish I finished the IMCR with him in the TB20 so if any of you fly with me and wonder about something, now you know why

I think that if I knew nothing else, the best IFR instructors to pick blindly are ones who currently fly TPs or jets.