Originally Posted by
Lozq
You sound like the kind of instructor I would sometimes hate flying with, and then deeply appreciate in the future when other people I meet say 'At *insert airline-esque flight school here* they didn't let us fly through military airspace, land on unsealed strips, etc'. A young lady I knew did most of her training somewhere in Melbourne, where they wouldn't let students fly over water. Her first major nav in Tassie was SEP across the Bass Strait. Funny, how schools are different. Insurance thing, or CFI preference I wonder?
On the topic of annoying controllers, I think I have a bit of an inferiority complex. I always feel that as a VFR training flight I don't really have a right to be getting in the way of RPT traffic, clogging up airspace for no real reason. Of course, without doing just that I'd never get the experience needed but still - I always feel a bit guilty doing it, and tend to plan routes under/around CTA's.
The thing that most instructors keep in mind for CPL candidates is that once you get the licence, there is every chance you could be flying my family around the top end in the middle of the wet season, and if the student isn't up to that then I'm not putting them up for the test. We do lots of unsealed strips, and our students are allowed to use unsealed strips such as dunwich solo once they have been checked by an instructor. The reality is they are the kinds of conditions most people fly under for their first job.
Some schools don't do that for a risk management perspective, but I suggest you don't have much confidence in your training provided if students can't do that.
As I am also a controller, I deal with light aircraft in controlled airspace all the time, and it's normally not a problem. Controlled airspace generally isn't meant to keep people out, it's just to provide a required level of safety in busy traffic environments. If you have the qualifications to use CTA then you really should use it.