I agree fully with SRT. I have been coming across of a whole lot of guys who are doing their CPLs who want to go directly on to turbines and want to take the short cuts. Especially the 19 year old ones, where daddy is funding the turbine rating. Some of them have and will probably get lucky.
It is all and well for skychick to motivate them going into instruction, however I do not support the idea, that a guy who does not have practical experience or talent to instruct - I think they should make an hour requirement of at least 500 hrs. An instructor must be payed well and must bring a true interest for instructing his students PROFESSIONALLY. There must be a standard and quality to the teaching and this should be monitored very closley by the authorities. There are a lot of low quality instructors in SA. I have also come across those with loads of experience - but sometimes their teaching style leaves much to be desired. Training is expensive enough and lays the foundation for the persons further carreer. An instructor must understand didactics and be able to adapt teaching skills to suit an individual. There are not many people who can actually do this.
There are traps in aviation, whichever way any person chooses I suppose. Taking myself as an example, I have flown about 1300 hours on SEP and MEP and am now busy transitioning to turbine. I may say, that I was a good student up to my CPL/IR -I was fortunate to have great instructors. In my first pilot job I was an ace flying those legs from A to B. However I failed to notice a slow decline in proficiancy in abnormal and emergency procedures and the cognitive flow pattern of them in a fast changing distress scenario. There was no system in place, to challange me to notice my "slow brain" earlier and in all honesty - the "experienced" instructors I came across and paid to shape me up, did not have the tools to even help me with this condition (they actually made it worse by hammering me and telling me that I suck instead of taking it a step back and speeding things back up from there) i.e. it is MY problem and it is haunting me at this time, where I actually want to take the next hurdle in my carreer. On the positive side: Facing the challange actually brings life back into my flying and all in all it will hopefully increase my awareness and make me do my job better.
I appologize for bouncing in and out of topic - I guess Mr. "Jet Cockpit" (only noticed his location now-very funny dude-now grow up) diverged the thread. So what I am saying all in all is: don't fool yourself and others. Get all the experience you can and put value to your name. If you take shortcuts or become slack, it will catch you (that is why I told my story here). There is and always will be a demand for real professionals in this industry and it takes a lot of time and experience to get there. I almost want to start another thread with the question: "When last did you take yourself to court". Would also be cool to hear some stories how some of you got around personal and general challanges in aviation.