PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Becoming an Instructor & related FI questions
Old 17th Sep 2004, 14:12
  #303 (permalink)  
Flingwing207
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
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Bellfest, you have certainly made your beliefs known!

However, especially with the IR, there is an aspect to learning you overlooked. IFR flight is first and foremost about procedure. Following procedure, understanding how to use the system, knowing the rules. Although there might be a lot of grey in the sky, there is little grey in the flying.

The undeclared, but tacitly official route to being a turbine pilot is via getting your ratings then working as an instructor (or the military, but that channel won't supply more than a small percent of the new pilots needed). Therefore, the civilian CFII track has become the "internship".

I understand your dismay at having someone who most likely has never piloted in actual training new IFR students, but remember that if the pilot is well-trained on instrument scan and aircraft control, procedure, weather, ATC and so on, then the presence of "actual" should not aversely affect the pilot's abilities. Since that CFII will most likely teach hundreds of hours of IFR training, they will be well drilled and practiced in all elements of IFR flight. Their students will likewise spend their time as CFII's. Only one in a thousand may somehow skip this step.

(In case you're wondering, I have never flown a helicopter in actual, nor would I want my first such flight to be SPIFR. However, I've never flown an EC130 either, nor would I want my first flight in one to be solo. This doesn't invalidate my training or CFI/CFII experience.)

Finally, the evidence shows (your gut feeling doesn't count) that our system for developing new IFR pilots is working. The helicopter IFR incidents/accidents seem to be indifferent to the relative experience level of the PIC (in terms of hours, anyway).

In the dream world (at least for this CFII), we would take new CFII's, put them in the SIC position for a few hundred hours, then return them to train new IFR pilots. However the safety stats for IFR ops don't seem call for that. They call for a review of operational policy, not pilot training.
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