I have had Mr SFB as a student, but I will call him Crapferbrains.
CFB came to my school from another school, because ours was closer to his home. He had a bucketful of money (he was in the money market), and according to his student records, he was progressing nicely and was nearly ready for solo. He wanted to go straight through to commercial.
Well, the first flight was a doozy, he had no idea what attitude was, couldn't fly straight and level, and definitely couldn't hover. In fact, he seemed to have precious little talent at all, and I realised that The Other School was waltzing him along to make sure they got his money. I told him we would be going back to basics, he didn't mind, he wanted to "do it right." We stuffed around for a couple of months of weekends, but the pressure of his work stopped him from doing any study, and he made zero progress.
A couple of weeks later, he declared that he wanted to finish the CPLH groundschool with me in one big hit, having already had a lot of schooling with The Other School, so we scheduled 3 weeks straight. He even deposited $25,000 with us to cover school and the rest of the flying course.
After 2 weeks of ground school in the morning and flying in the afternoon, I told him that he would never cut it as a commercial pilot. He still hadn't made it to solo after 50 hours. He had $13,000 left in his account, and I gave it back to him.
he thanked me for being honest.
Two weeks later, he rings me and says that he went back to The Other School, got 83% overall in the exam, and the following week he passed the CPL ride - with THEIR testing officer.
Shortly afterwards, he lobbed into our heliport in a JetRanger, took on a full load of gas, put in 4 big boofy guys, 5 sets of golf clubs, and lurched into the sky for a golf course 3000' amsl. Amazingly, the machine got off the ground, and even got back again.
He is now in another state. Luckily he is never likely to be in my airspace again.
Footnote: The Other School was subsequently busted for exam fraud (staff doing the exams for students), the CFI was booted, but the school still exists.
