Homelover,
The point of a famil is also an introduction to SOPs, to set the scene and show the student the importance of the course to come. It's obviously a very difficult, intensive course and I believe that getting airborne for the first time with a 'YeeHah, let's do this" attitude sets the wrong tone, as does calling your student 'mate' and also allowing him or her to do the same to you.
Maybe that's just me. My credentials, as you asked, are that I passed CFS 25 years ago and have been an A2 QFI for the past 20 years. Please tell me yours.
The F4 ‘mates’ that I flew with nearly 30 years ago as a basic stude on the JP certainly exuded some of this “wrong tone” you refer to. Indeed, one guy I can remember (sadly no longer with us) used to call us ‘honey bun’ or ‘sugar lips’ as a term of amusing endearment whilst airborne. The “tone” that these guys set compared to the po-faced ‘holier than thou’ types from the other fleets, that got far less out of us than the F4 types that treated us with humour and fun in the most professional of ways - it was never in doubt who was the instructor and who was the stude. Indeed, I was so inspired by that attitude that I took much of it to my own job as an instructor on a FJ OCU - oddly enough, achieving A2 myself with a similar attitude 11 years after flying with them. No need to be mean, po-faced, humourless and down right nasty even in the most trying of circumstances; I always tried to remember the very best instructors I had in my time as a stude (“Major”, “Uncle”, “M2”, “Tug”, “Slam”, “Cheesey”, to name but a few...oddly all with callsigns/nicknames in the very early 90s!). Don’t forget most F4 mates were not known to suffer fools gladly when their studes screwed up, too! I also tried to remember just how cr@p I probably was when I took Aircrew out to a Tornado for their first trips; being humble and friendly at that point often worked miracles with the most nervous of studes. I also had no issue calling them ‘mate’ and vice-versa nearly 20 years ago - again, only I would decide whether they had made the grade in each syllabus sortie for them to pass onto the next (calling me ‘mate’ would neither pass or fail or trip - nor, even as a Sqn Ldr, using a sycophantic ‘Sir’ in the cockpit neither!). So there was never any doubt who was instructor and who was stude...simple as...