Good points...
 

I have all the FAA Flight Instructor licences: Flight Instructor Airplane Instrument Multi-engine Gold Seal plus Ground Instructor Advanced Instrument. (This "Gold Seal" thingy is just a yellow FAA logo on the FI licence to show that you have GI plus an 80% pass rate for your students, worth having as a marketing tool.)

It is so much easier in the States, using the PTS booklets to show the students exactly what they must do, the minimum required. We try to go beyond that, of course but at least there's no confusion about whether my way of doing a short-field takeoff, for instance, is correct or just "my way".

There has been a big problem in the States. Maybe it has been fixed now but it was so, about 20 years ago, that bottom-feeder schools would just run overseas students through with the bare minimum number of hours to be tested by in-house examiners and sent back overseas with an FAA licence that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. I have had co-pilots with FAA ATP licences who were incapable of doing a circuit in a Cessna 404! When I would ask them how they got the ticket the same schools always seemed to be mentioned, with 5 hours in a single, one hour in a twin, the practical test, "Finish palaver!" All for $5 thousand. Disgraceful.

This would totally devalue the FAA licence, since you cannot tell who is whom. Can I fly or am I a plonker? Who knows? With a British CAA ATPL, well, at least you know the guy got through a tough ride! You do still get the odd loser but nothing like so dire as some of the products of our American free-enterprise system.

I think this may have been sorted out after it finally became too obvious what was going on.

Most of my flying has been done in Africa, Nigeria and now Algeria, with training given mostly by Brits or Europeans. It is striking how many variations there can be on a theme.

For instance, the straight-ahead stall in a Part 25 Transport Category airplane is normally done to "the first indication of a stall". So, power off, decelerate at 1 knot/second while achieving a certain positive pitch attitude, stall horn or stick shaker, "Stall!", full power, smooth pitch over to level flight, accelerate, "Stall recovery complete." Well, not always! I have had people wanting to see a full-breaking stall in the simulator, when that sim doesn't have to do whatever the airplane does in that regime. (And, no, I don't want to know what it does in that regime because we are not going past the stick pusher to find out! Maybe it does an unrecoverable deep stall.) I don't know, the guy just likes to see the full stall, the way we do it in a Cessna 152. You cannot bring out the book because there is no book, no PTS.

I will be going in the spring to do a JAR Flight Instructor course. It should be interesting to get an inside look at how instructors are trained, having only seen the end product.

When it comes to South African pilots, yes, they seem to be to a pretty good standard just judging by operating in their close vicinity (Just not too close, please!). That said, it is easy to see that if you continue without proper supervision you will end up, umm, Africanised. Good luck with that one.