(Rick Durden) wrote
You've discovered one of the real shortcomings of ab initio flight
training where they teach students how to become commuter airline
pilots rather than how to fly. Thus the giant sized patterns. It's a
true pain in the whatsis.

If they were real ab-initio career training programs where the
graduate of the program goes straight into the right seat of an
airliner, it would not be such a bad thing. They could do as they
wanted at their (usually towered) training bases, and we would not
have to deal with them very much elsewhere.

The problem is that these are not real ab-initio career programs. The
graduates of these programs mostly leave the school at 250-300 hours
with CFI/CFII/MEI ratings, and spend the next several hundred hours
teaching elsewhere. That's where they do the real damage.

These guys move on after a year or three and are mostly not seen in GA
again, but their students are mostly not career track, and we have to
deal with them in GA for as long as they're going to fly.

We (and by that I mean the CFI's here and in the pilot lounges, who
are mostly not headed for the airlines) all sit around and talk about
how none of our students would ever fly airliner-sized patterns, since
we taught them better than that, so it must be some other guy's
students. Well, guess what - for every one of us, there are half a
dozen of them - and by them I mean the ab-initio career program
graduates. What's more, for every student we train, they train half a
dozen - because we're mostly part time and they're mostly full time.

How bad is it? Once I inadvertently cut off a guy in the pattern. He
was so far outside me on downwind (and a couple hundred feet high to
boot) that it just never occurred to me that he was in the pattern.
The sad thing is, he was in a Cherokee and I was in a Twin Comanche.

Michael