I hadn't realised how humourless and ill-informed so many pontificating pc contributors are.
Violence to students. A tap on the bone dome to get him to look at the aircraft he is formating on, is not violence. Ever tried to do more than that when shoulder to shoulder in a JP? Sometimes tempted to try when the post lunch diced carrot was rattling onto your left sleeve.
It is easy to forget there were probably more students in one small FTS in the early 60s than there are now total pilots in the whole RAF. It was a sausage machine but we tried to produce gourmet sausages.
Though the CFS system was intensely boring to learn, it worked.
The vast majority of QFIs were doing the job from choice and CFS could be quite picky as to who went there. Even the creamies, whom one might have expected to be a bit disappointed, were keen on the job. Don't know if that changed later.
Can't remember a student asking for an instructor change but if we were having trouble getting the message across the first resort was to let someone else have a go.
The selection system was by no means perfect. Remember sitting at the back of the student crew room as a new course marched in and hoping the one swinging left arm and left leg together was not going to be one of mine. Some courses lost quite a few, others no chops at all. Most went in the early general handling or IF stage thus saving large amounts of money. In my student days we started with 17 and finished with 11.
The object was to produce as good a pilot as possible from a course that became increasingly difficult with ever higher standards required. There was very little slack in the hours permitted to achieve those standards. If you couldn't cope in a JP, such an easy, forgiving aircraft, you were not going to cope at the next stage.
Think all my students survived and a couple of years ago at a 70th birthday I was thanked by a student from 50 years earlier. Surprised and gratified. We were not intolerant monsters nor were we fluffy cuddly mollycoddlers.