His instructor suggested he needed practice at limited panel as well.
My initial GA issue was 40-odd years ago so I might be a bit out of touch .. don't folk still have to demonstrate competence on limited panel for the test ? In my case it was a limited panel takeoff, circuit and landing .. with the takeoff and landing pattered just sufficiently to avoid frightening the examiner excessively. While I hadn't done any practice in that sort of thing during my training, I had done 20 hours or so of such good fun at the conclusion of my PPL training 10 years or so earlier.
The student disagreed saying his own aircraft had a glass cockpit with reversion modes and limited panel would never happen.
An interesting philosophical approach .. a bit like presuming the idiot in the car on the left really won't go through the intersection wiping you out in the process ?
I have no familiarity with the present crop of GA glass toys so I don't know what can and can't be failed in flight .. but the dinosaur bit of paper/cardboard can cover up a lot of useful stuff on the training/test day.
During the conduct of a holding pattern prior to an ILS, the instructor failed the artificial horizon without first warning the student.
Many years ago, the first batch of AN DC9 pilot endorsements were in the US, as I recall. One of the folk involved related a tale that the instructor pulled an engine on the very first aircraft training sortie takeoff .. the reason given post flight was along the lines that "well, son, we don't know just when a failure might occur .. "
I recall, as a newly minted F27 FO departing out of DPO on a nil pax positioning flight .. my go and the (quite experienced line) captain pulled an engine during the rotation .. OK, I handled it appropriately .. but the surprise factor makes it (and any other significant failure) a whole lot different to the training environment where one is full of enthusiastic anticipation.
More realistically (and without any knowledge of this particular student's training and progress), some students are sufficiently thick skinned that progress stumbles due to pig headedness and they need a short sharp wake up call .. perhaps this was one of those occasions ?
In less than 45 seconds after the AH failure the student went into an ever steepening spiral dive and lost control.
Methinks that suggests something about the student's attitudes and competence at that stage of his training ?
Worse still, the student accused the instructor of deliberately setting out to cause him to crash.
Quite apart from attitude, such a sequence is suggestive of a poor approach to the learning process.
he decided to proceed with what was essentially a box-ticking exercise
I suggest that the more reasonable conclusion is that the instructor's intent was diametrically opposite ?
Modern aircraft require modern approaches to training, something that seems to be difficult to comprehend for some instructors.
I guess that's why mishaps such as the Air France stall and subsequent hull loss lead to paradigm changes in training evolution ?