Yawningdog, are you saying that all FI's are monkeys?
Agreed flight training is a low margin business but in my opinion their is no more poverty in flight training than there has ever been. Certainly there are far more gadgets and gismos fitted to training airplanes now than fifty years ago and chapters more of regulations. It could be argued that training should be more extensive but then we could argue that for all types of training from doctors to car drivers too. The potential problem if flight training was made more comprehensive then the added training costs may well put potential students off of training altogether. It could be argued that that would not be a bad thing since there is a huge problem in gaining employment after commercial training anyway so an increase in training costs could be used as a sort of congestion charge! Bad news for new instructors in the short term because the reduction of bodies would be in the student department several years before the abundance of instructors was resolved.
The question of poor returns in the flight training industry will perpetuate all the time that there is so much competition by flight schools for students and there will always be competition as it is all the time that schools can set up on a shoestring using old wrecks of airplanes and have hour building instructors fighting each other for the privilege of flying them for tea money.
Back tom the topic, my view is that flight training is in my view becoming more and more complex and there are more opportunities to see the shortcomings in new pilots now than before. I believe that flight training for the new JAA licence is more difficult than for the old CAA licence and yes, I do have an old CAA licence. But no, I don't have a tatoo.
