No Idea!!
 

Is it me or are more pilot coming out of flying schools with no idea?
Im an engineer and cpl holder with nearly 1000 hours and have been working in GA for the last 12 years,only this year Ive renewed my cpl and thanks too a certain NT operater Im back in the sadle.
The amont of bad pilotship that I see can only be blamed to the flying schools whos intrest is the old dollar factor,Simple things like parking aircraft into wind where possible,taxing with doors open,leaving doors open on parked aircraft,taxing with too much power on and riding brakes(throtle back)Starting engines cold and reving the **** out of them,Had a 210 on jacks in the hangar and had a baron taxie up and point its arse into the hangar,the pilot was talked too and then handed a broome,taxing twins with one engine at idle and the other at 1000rpm,just ride the oppisite brake that will keep it straight,Not cleaning you A/C after your flight,Had a pilot ask me what that white round thing with champion on it was hanging off the back of a 210 engine,Asked pilot what he/SHE thought it was,"is that the magneto"Um no try oil filter,just like on your car. Basicly dont be embarrased to ask questions the day you stop learning is the day you drop dead.
Please dont take this as engineer versus pilot but something has too change,this is all basic stuff i learnt from my instructor back in the early 90s,
Choose a flying school that has instructors that have true charter and remote flying experience soo you come up here with out your head shoved up your bum and be prepared for a hard but satisfying experience

It comes down to a few things.

1. A 200hr Instructor or one with no world experience or one that’s so far up himself he knows it all (guess who paid for his flying) teaching theses new CPL holders everything they know.

2. An Instructor that gets paid shight to Instruct therefore does not give rats.

And there is the common sense thing and I do believe young people these days do not have any.

So what chance have we got except for the highly trained and highly professional Instructors out there.

I'd love to know what the average student pilot is meant to do about this...

like, something realistic, not pie in the sky wishfull thinking

No idea!!
 

If you want to make a difference you can make a point of sharing some of your knowledge with the relaively inexperinced pilots you come in contact with.
If ther e is a decowled aircraft in the hanger invite them over and point out some of the "good" bits, trace the magneto leads and discover which mag fires which plugs, look at the vac pump and explain how they usually fail, identify the leads coming off the alternator.......I could go on and on

The responsibility for improving the working knowledge of new pilots lies with US! Sure instructors/flying schools may be letting the side down but then again in this dollar driven world they dont get paid for doing guided tours of an aircrafts guts.

If we all made a point of increasing a less experinced pilots understanding, I think that we would rapidly see a change overall.

Cfi care I totaly agree but how many pilots i see at work who envent something too do than come an help out in the hangar.!0years ago all our pilots would work in the hangar when theres was no flying ,better than having no job i guess,At least these guys and gals could tell you over the phone what the airraft was doing,makes it easy to no what parts too take out on a recovery.

Its a very good point that rings true all too often.

How many newbies know what a HF is? Let alone how to use one? How many newbies get sent North on the trek for a job without a DG certificate? Granted these are very basic points but shouldn't flying schools prepare CPL candidates for GA charter work if its not a cadetship?

I look back at my training and I was very happy with the standard I recieved, most of it with GRII and GRI instructors. I worked in the hanger (or should I say I got in the way in the hanger) which taught me a thing or 2.

How many 250 pilots would be confident say doing a Darwin - Hodgson Downs charter without their handheld GPS? My sadistic side but I love taken em of em....

No one is perfect (well then again theres me...) you are not expected to know everything just to have a basic knowledge and brains. Blowing a hanger out is a common sense thing nothing to do with flying.

There is no clear cut answer to this issue.

Flying schools are not entirely to blame. It's business and what sells, so they cannot be blamed for pursuing what is necessary for the company's survivial.

Sure they may not have many instructors who have a lot of 'real world' GA charter, but there are not too many people who are interested in instructing once they have accrued hours 'up north' and are ready for turbine jobs...

If one flying school then decided to pay wages appropriate to attract a bush pilot instructor type back to the big smoke, then it would be out of business pretty smart, as little johnny (or parents therof) want little johnny to be an airline pilot, and those glossy brochures of 767s are sadly what is sold.

As has been lamented in other threads most is the fact that pilots are not taught to fly these days - they are taught to be an airline pilot in a GA light aircraft, and they are two totally different things. Procedures are different, and they should be taught as such.

A good example of this (which is a can of worms in itself) is the use of checklists in light aircraft 'cos that's the way airlines do it.

A non pilot colleague who travels with my company and has travelled with another company remarked on the fact that a pilot for company XYZ shut the doors in the C4XX, and proceeded to carefully go through his prestart checks methodically and s l o w l y from a checklist. This had a double effect on the passengers - some it unnerved ("is this pilot new?") and they all started melting in the 50+C temps brewing in the cabin. Eventually, the engine was started and the aircon switched on.

I believe that in the 'real' world, one starts that engine ASAP and gets that aircon on. The second engine, txpr codes, taxi calls, ATIS listening, can wait if it needs, get the pax comfortable first.

Much airmanship also boils down to common sense, and sadly that is very difficult to teach. You can lead a horse to water.... Ever driven in a car with a pilot whose airmanship skills you believe are a little lacking? Well funnily enough road skills are often lacking too....

Lack of HF radio skills is a popular thing browned northern pilots lament about in their green southern colleagues. In reality, there are very few aircraft fitted with serviceable HFs. I had 800 odd hours before I headed north and had never flown an HF equipped aircraft. What it boils down to are: Senior pilots/CPs taking a new green pilot under his/her wings and imparting this knowledge (and removing said GPS!) AND the willingness for a pilot who may have been top of his/her heap in the flying school down south and knew lots to be humble and know that there its a lot to learn.

Another airmanship thing - runups when stationary on gravel. :rolleyes: Also the revving of engines when cold AND on gravel - the pinging of the props on sucked up gravel. Regularly I would clear an area under my prop(s) of lose gravel with foot or hand. Some pilots though that was stupid, but I never damaged a prop from gravel (and I was usually the only pilot to fly the aircraft for the whole 100 hours).

It is up to us more senior/expereinced outback operators to encourage and foster the new pilots to these less obvious tricks, and it will work as long as they (and anyone else for that matter realises that A CPL is a licence to learn.

[/RANT]

:p

I think it must be a general society thing. A bit like phone box wrecking. "I don't own it, I don't have to pay for it or for fixing it - I don't give a rats a***. I try to teach my students all the good bits that gottom 2 dollars talks about, and then some more. A lot of my students are not interested. The general attitude is "put the minimum in - get the maximum out". I get my students to study via the Trevor Thom books. They ask me to tell them what the important bits are they should read. I tell them the unimportant bits have been left out already. They are happy to pass the exam with 70.5%. I tell them that you can't pass a flight with 99%. The 1% might kill you. Needless to say some go elsewhere where it is easier to get the 'ticket'. It always amuses me on how many people know exactly what it is they "don't need to know", but few know what they "need to know". Flying schools get a lot of flack and I'm sure some deserve every bit of it, but, "you can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink". I have 2 teenagers at home. They come home from high school and know exactly what rights they have. They don't seem to have a clue what responsibilities they have. One of our fellows ppruners signs off with something like "experience is a hard task master, you get the test first and the lesson later". Too many people want that ticket without the experience and lessons. The customer is king and if the customer shops around a bit, the customer gets what the customer wants.

You can bitch about it all day, unless the people in the industry are prepared to mentor newly licensed pilots then nothing is going to change.
I have always believed that a CPL/PPl is a licence to learn but I have failed quite a few due to lack of general and specific knowledge, this has often been after they were specifically told bt me that I expected them to put in the hard yards.
As a general observation the vast majority of successful flight tests are ones where the preflight theory evaluation has been completed to a high standard and the flying is almost a formality...these are the people I have no problem reccommending for flying positions.

CFIcare wrote:
But first these PPL/CPL's to be must WANT to learn about the engines and systems that they would soon be operating. It all comes down to the candidate's attitude. Luckily enough being originally a motor mechanic by trade helped me greatly to understand just what I was playing at when I wandered into the hangar to help the ame/lame's conduct maintainence.

I was originally exposed to HF in a marine environment (from a very young age), and in all honesty it is just another radio that requires just a couple more tweaks to get them clean and clear.

Perhaps we might start a thread describing (to those who might actually wish to learn something), the intracacies (spl?) of the common garden variety HF radio? ;)

Hey HA ,we bin go down to ribber and drink some lady in a boat!
And i bin let you screw my girlpriend

Yup. that'll get ya a mate at work.

Most of us new CPL holders want to learn, there's just a lack of opertunities to do so. I'm more than happy to spend my free time learning the ropes somewhere, any good samaritins who don't mind my terrible spelling, i am open to any offers

was that not subtle enough?

I say all CPL and ATPL holders should resit exams every 2 years so that they stay fresh.....

Should make the place safer... coz they dont make em like the used too....

Dog

Money Maker?
 

I've been thinking about the low standard of CPL's for a while, my own included when it was shiny and new. I found I learnt a huge amount in my first job just by talking to my more experienced work colleagues and the engineers. The thing is, even with an experienced career instructor, there are things that have to be learnt in the bush.

Therefore, I present "Grrowlers Advanced Flight Training with REAL Industry Experience"!


A combined charter/ flying school operation based in remote area which takes PPL's from selected schools in the cities and turns them into hardened GA pilots over 6 - 10 months.

They would be getting exposure to and logging hours in charter aircraft (210, 310, BE-58, etc), they would be "working" in the hangar doing 50 hrlys and seeing the systems first hand.

There would be no "There's a cloud in the sky, I'll call in sick", or "That's not a runway, its dirt and has trees around it."

They would understand the need for aircraft to make money.

Throw in the incentive of a possible job at the end of their training!

Accomodation and meals.

As much fun as boot camp! :D

For the special price of $60,000 (give or take a bit)

All while I (or whoever takes the idea) get fat and rich...

Seriously though, I think it would make some bloody good pilots.

Huh???
 

Yes, we all need to be able to flight plan a B727 or Echo Mk 4....NOT! :D:D

I do enough checks a year, thank you very much. 4 Cyclics, 1 Route Check, EP's and CRM. Then DG's every other.

Let's retest all motor vehicle licence holders every 2 years. It'll probably save more lives.

One of the reasons standards are atrocious is because you have a majority of sub-200 hour pilots attempting to teach. Until such time as minimum experience levels are raised, nothing will change.

An addage to this is that flight instruction offers a very limited career path, unless you are fortunate enough to land a job at one of the large colleges. Even then, the temptation of an airline with remuneration (in many instances) several times the maximum you could ever earn teaching at colleges is present. And quite often the workload is less.

Until such time as the role of the Flying instructor is given the value it deserves, the standards will continue to decline.......

Going to the hangar and watching maintenance is nice for one's knowledge, but what is the practical significance? So what if we know "that is a magneto" and "that is an oil filter" As pilots, we are quite limited (rightly so) in what maintenance tasks we can perform. Those teaching future professional pilots need to concentrate more on the basic skills of flying and less on the sundries.

Hugh Jarse

This is demonstrably untrue. Minimum for a CPL issue is 150 hours. An instructor course comprises a minimum of 50 hours training. A NVFR rating is required prior to undertaking the Instructor course, however this may(sometimes) be completed as part of the CPL training.

Whilst I agree that many new Grade 3 instructors are little more than safety pilot's, they soon improve. Or those that apply themselves do. I have trained dozens of instructors and agree that the CPL standard of handling and theory knowledge is falling. I often spend briefing time dragging theory knowledge up to an acceptable (to me) standard, when I should be teaching "how to teach".

One idea is a more centralised Instructor School. As in maybe one or two only in Australia, a full time live in course, say 2-3 months.

I occasionally come across some very senior instructors and CFi's with strange ideas too. For example, whilst discussing the techniques to use for hand swinging a prop to start an aircraft with insufficient battery power to crank, I was told that I must have the master on otherwise the engine would not fire. You should have seen his face when I started it sans master on. ;)
This from a CFI.

I know to be a Hang Gliding instructor or diving instructor one has to sit ALL the exams already passed along the way again and get very high marks (100% for Hang Gliding) and HGFA instructors must attend a training seminar/conference every year.

Some interesting ideas but once again where is CASA helping here, how much time and effort do they put in to training and safety education?

CASA is trying to help? :eek:
Bwahahahahaha! That's a good one... ya got any more like that? :D

Pure semantics Icarus2001. Yes, I made a mistake. And you know that I meant pilots with a bare CPL going straight into Instructor Ratings.

I have trained my fair share of instructors also. I have also flown (as a student way back when) with pimply faced instructors that wouldn't know their ar$e from their elbow. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Sure, but who pays for it in the meantime while they are learning? The students...

Indeed. Probably because they were taught by inexperienced pilots when they were up-and-coming Grade 3's.

That's because there is very little standardisation in the flying training industry. I worked at a large establishment that was big on standardisation. You taught it their way 'or the highway'. Regular surveillance by Management Pilots, and strict application of training standards at renewal time ensured consistent quality of workmanship. The client airlines demanded it.

Now, if an organisation with over 50 Instructors can manage it, why can't one with 5? Surely it would be easier?

Casa supposedly sets the minimum standard to which Instructor candidates must reach. Who applies the standard? The flying school. Now if that ain't a conflict of interest I don't know what is.....

The responsibility for testing of candidates has been passed onto the industry. The industry has to take responsibility for the generally $hitty standard that prevails......................

I agree with you. Some form of centralised training organisation would probably go a long way to rectifying the current problems. However, the authority taking a more proactive approach like insisting (and surveilling to ensure) certain standards are achieved with regard to quality of training would be even better.

Exams every two years - bugga that!! :confused:

There are a few pilots who know the square root of the pickle but can't open the jar! Try again.

How about CPLs gaining a little more experiance before starting an Instructor rating - say a few hundred hours.

(Howls of protest from production Instructor schools and fresh CPLs with 50NM apron strings)

I only know 2/10's of SFA about the rotary world but I do seem to recall that a level of experiance is needed before a Helo Instructor rating can be attempted.

Have I got the right country/system in mind (I do get confused - bars, aircraft, wives, airports & stories are becoming a blur the older I get)?.

Any of our Helo brethren care to confirm/deny please.