Originally Posted by
Mickey Kaye
Well I’m based in a different part of the UK to Bose-x and I would say there is a shortage of instructors in my part of the woods and I dread to think what it would be like if the airlines start hiring.
Now I’m not saying there are full time 80 hours month positions. More more like Saturday and or Sundays so you want become a millionaire. But its flying, its some money, and it still leaves you free to earn a crust doing the week.
However one thing I would agree with Bose-x is that the caliber of the applicants is poor.
Poor is a variable thing of-course.
They appear to have little GA knowledge or interest. Have flown a limited rage of aircraft (and I mean only pa28 and to me utterly useless MEP time) and none of them ever have any tailwheel experience.
Which is why it's great being a CRI with a lot of vintage/tailwheel/homebuilt time. I can fill my weekends if I want with teaching that "regular" FIs can't or won't do.
When I was doing my CPL I had maybe 1000hrs, and my instructor maybe 3000. Discovering over a coffee that he had no tailwheel time, I offered to take him up for a freebie in my favourite 60+ year old toy. His response:
"Why on earth should I do that?, I fly for a job, I don't want to waste my own time doing it."
In retrospect he did do an excellent job of teaching me to pass my CPL skill test, but far less about flying than I've learned from various high hour PPLs I've shared aeroplanes with.
So far as I know he's still working as an instructor, and still can't work out why he can't get a job flying a jet.
I can live with the fact that they have low hours and are restricted but they are going to need a fair few hours before they can be let them loose on the paying public and frankly not many schools can afford such expenditure.
And there does seem to be a mentality there that just believes that it's all about passing a skill test and for a lucky few getting an airline job.
I also wonder what an earth some of these integrated courses teach their students. I was recently chatting to one of their ex students with a freshly minted FI rating who had never even heard of the IMC rating.
Simple, they teach them to pass the CPL skill test and ME/IR in minimum hours. Nothing more, nothing less.
Shocking state of affairs really.
Yes.
Think about it this way - the majority of professional pilots will either become instructors (all GA general handling basically) or airline pilots (all teamwork and automation monitoring). So we have a system which prepares people for these two jobs by - err, teaching them huge amounts of precision hand-flown navigation, which neither will do any significant amount of their time.
Frankly the CPL should be about 25% about nav, about 25% about doing stuff by whatever book you're working to and flying the aeroplane fairly well, and about 50% about handling emergencies. At the moment it's about 80/10/10. That way I suspect we'd get better airline pilots and better instructors both.
Solving that would be easy - change the skill test requirements. Reduce the tolerances on the nav test, make the emergencies and handling bits much tougher; maybe include some mandatory tailwheel time and some flights into uncontrolled grass runways. The whole picture would change overnight.
G