Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
Wise. That said, if you elect to become an instructor in Canada, you are joining a team, a training team - in Canada - with Canadian methods and standards. You owe it to both your employer, and your students to behave with the spirit of a team member. Use the tools you have been given and genuinely do your best with them. Don't train an eager student, all the while cursing under your breath that you'd rather be..... No one is demanding your joining the training team, so if you elect to, be a team member, through and through. If you can do that, we have heard the last of your disdain for the Canadian system.
Sure, it usually does - good job!
Horsefeathers. Aside from needing certain geographical/topographical features for training, otherwise, the locale of the instructor does not make the training better or worse - the instructor skill does. If you think that the capability of Canadian instructors is lacking, you're flying with the wrong Canadians. Every nation can offer great pilots/instructors, and mediocre pilots/instructors - it's up to you to figure out who is who! Certainly, I've been asked to provide advanced training to "pilots" who have met the licensing requirements. I guess that they met those requirement - they have the license - but they did not meet my requirements of skill for the advanced training they sought. If they can't keep a 172 within five feet of the centerline, I'm not eager to do tailwheel or water training with them - but they met the standard for a PPL on the type that they were examined in.
Sure, I think that the standards which were used to find some pilots to be satisfactory during examination were weak. I'd like to see tighter standards, and more training, from higher skill instructors for all students. Will that help our industry? Maybe/maybe not. If we make the standards so high that low experience instructors cannot succeed in preparing most students to pass in the time allotted/practical time, have we helped? Be careful what you ask for, if the Canadian training standards were raised (to where I'd be happy to see them), would you have the skill and experience to train to them? Would you want to lose one third of your students because they simply gave up? Could you be truly happy with yourself if your student consistently met a standard which was considered "satisfactory" in Canada, and they all passed their exams?
Again, if you would like to be taken seriously about piloting on a Canadian forum on the internet, or at a Canadian flying school, you're going to have to demonstrate that you can embrace the Canadian system as it is, for better or worse. Make your students so genuinely eager that they seek out the extra training that both you, and I, think that they should have. To do that, lead them to embrace the basics first, by your example....
It's not just the standards. As I said, the extra maneuvers that are never taught in Canada (and are in the FAA for CPL students), like the Eight on Pylons, Lazy Eight and Chandelles, all require extreme fine tuning and finessing to pass, and all based on smooth control (and extremely good coordination for the lazy eights, that are anything but lazy). If you have any coordination problem, you are unlikely to nail the lazy night. Eight on Pylons will definitely nail your Ex 15 (illusions), and if you can do that, you are almost guarantee to never get into the illusions.
I'm not saying they should be a FTI, but teaching they could help improving your controls significantly (just like teaching a spin for PPL students, even though it's not a FTI).
What I'm getting at is, knowing those exercises, I can utilize the knowledge and experience they give in the benefit of my students (for example, a student getting a hard time understanding illusions will find Eight on Pylons to be the perfect understanding. As my examiner said, use wings over words anytime. Maybe showing on Lazy Eight to show how perfect coordination create beautiful exercise (and you'll only understand it if you did once, it's beautiful).
The way I see it - knowledge is power.