Originally Posted by
popeye107
CFS A1 and A2 cats became totally irrelevant when I saw a non commissioned instructor totally balls up a lesson on Dominie electrics in front of a checking CFS…to a point where the students were re-taught by another instructor.
Normally you’d expect said instructor to be held back a year.
In this case bar politics came into place and the instructor was re-checked on an easy lesson. A2 achieved, A2 worthless.
The new A2 instructor was subsequently removed from instructional duties for all the wrong reasons in 2010ish, for all the reasons CAS is on fire.
A2 became worthless the day CFS guy gave his Special Fwend an A2. Same story today, about the A2 ‘Fwend’ would more than satisfy any newspaper to put the next nail in.
A B2 qualification became the same as an A1 instructional qualification that day; let’s not talk nonsense about an impartial and acceptable training system, it was rancid back then, and there’s no evidence it has changed.
No, it devalued or made worthless the categories awarded by a single NCO examiner, not the entire CFS system. If the NCO aircrew training system was indeed rancid at the time, that was a problem induced by those in it, perhaps a bit of cultural drift driven by the few rather than the many?
When I did my own A2 QFI upgrade there was a process that lead to a recommendation you were suitable to upgrade before you got anywhere near an examiner. There were 4 separate elements required for an A2; you had to be assessed as Above Average for pure flying skills, ground (ie professional) knowledge and, crucially, your ability to instruct in both domains. Failure to clear any one of those 4 bars meant no upgrade.
Any system that recognises and uses categorisation of professional skills and competences relies on the integrity of the people making those judgments. That means putting good people into the training regime in the first place, otherwise overall standards start to slip.