H500, I have thought of something positive to say, reading my own posts I come across as a "Holier than thou prat"
I don't need to criticise you when your fault analysis of yourself is so thorough
So you are telling me that you can't take a 400 hour pilot, thoroughly brief the main element of the sortie (VOR) and then introduce some ad hoc GH (which he asked for) and a simulated emergency that didn't involve any safety critical systems being deselected? Are you also telling me you can't introduce anything into the sortie that hasn't been thoroughly briefed before hand? Remember we are talking about someone going for CPL, not a basic PPL student.
Many of my SAR instructional and examination sorties had a basic outline brief with anything specific that need to be worked on, covered in more detail BUT when a student smashes the easy stuff, you want to be able to assess how good/what potential they have (much of my role was in developing pilots to Op Captaincy and beyond) so you have to be able to introduce unbriefed scenarios/emergencies so you can see what they know and can do.
If all you do is brief fly and debrief the required elements then you might well satisfy the rules and regs but you are not testing the student except to see if they can reproduce what you briefed them on.
However the students standard SHOULD have been established in the briefing room
do please tell me how you assess the standard of his handling/airmanship/captaincy that way.
I seem to have managed to be compliant as an instructor since 1989, constantly been assessed as above average and frequently exceptional and instructed everything from basic students to QHI students and those with tens of hours to those with many thousands of hours. You will, of course, just say this is me being arrogant but I know I am just one of many mil instructors who keep churning out good quality product iaw all the training directives, safety considerations, rules and regs - don't think that is really anti-authority, do you?
The S92 incident was a classic case of the crew talking themselves out of having a problem (undemanded yaw on lift) and then continuing the task and coming very close to losing the aircraft when the TR malfunction recurred because it had never gone away. Not a job well done (apart from keeping a spinning helo on a helideck) but poor awareness and CRM.