QFIs
There seems to be a lot of banter here about lousy QFIs, particularly Creamies. As an ex-Creamie, I can understand this as I know that I for one was not a particularly good instructor. The main reason for this was my extreme frustration at being creamed off when I desperately wanted to get on to fighters and go overseas. (This was in the 60s, when Labour were planning to pull out of all the glamorous overseas locations). My error was coming top of my course at Basic and Advanced. The cruel lesson for me was – don’t try hard, or the bastards will screw you! Still – if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined.
After that I went to Chivenor to fly DF/GA Hunters and was appalled at the lack of professionalism of some of the PAIs. Quite a few of them made not the slightest effort to ‘instruct’ properly, expecting the student to get things right just from hearing the Phase Brief. On the ground their stock-in-trade consisted of constant humiliation of the students, (Particularly ex-Creamies), while their instructional patter during a demo pass might run to “S***t! I’m almost as spastic as you are”. On my Air-to-Air dual the PAI gave me so much hassle that I only fired the gun once. After a solo cine sortie I managed to teach myself the technique and achieved 45% average for the course on the flag, having had not a word of worthwhile airborne instruction from a PAI.
In my view people like that should have been 1020'd off the unit for deliberate dereliction of duty - for petulantly refusing to carry out the job they had been trained for.
Later on I discovered that a large part of the PAI course consisted of weapon sortie after weapon sortie (solo), just to build up the student PAI’s personal weapon skill, with not much time devoted to actual instructional practice. The resultant skill level allowed them to ‘lord it’ over their students.
Fortunately, not all PAIs were like that. Some could use correct instructional techniques and actually improve student standards.