Originally Posted by
ShyTorque
Problem was, it should have been: “I can do it, I’ve shown yer, why can’t you do it?”
I suffered one ex RAF instructor whilst qualifying for my CPL(A). I’d not flown a fixed wing for some years, but I was an ex RAF QFI and QHI myself, at that time fully current on rotary. I felt I needed to be given a few nuggets of help and left to get on with with it, at least to begin with, unless I was doing something blatantly wrong or dangerous. Instead, this instructor nagged constantly, even before takeoff, to the point that I could no longer concentrate. During one debrief I asked him to desist with the constant chat while I was flying, obviously unless he thought I was going to kill us, but he just couldn’t shut up. On a subsequent flight I eventually asked him to take control because I’d had enough. He got surprisingly aggressive, insisting I carried on flying. I landed, shut the aircraft down and told him that his methods of “instruction” might have been deemed acceptable thirty years ago at RAF BFTS, but not when I was paying at a civilian flying school, and walked away from him. I went to the chief instructor and told him that there was no way I was going to pay any more to fly with this chap, and I didn’t.
I had a sort of opposite to that. In 1999 I went to Florida to build some hours to allow the relatively simple process, in those days, of gaining a CPL(A) based on having my ATPL(H) etc. I just needed few extra FW hours, including some Night P1, I recall. I had an instructor, for a night check flight, who was pleasant enough, but very talkative and keen to constantly pass on pearls of (pretty simple/obvious) wisdom, as we did the walkaround, start up and taxy to the holding point. As we waited for a gap to depart in, he asked "so how many hours have you got so far?" I said "oh, about six and a half thousand, with fifteen hundred night". He left me to my own devices thereafter.....