In my limited experience dealing with those who earned their certificates
long before I was even born, I do tend to agree somewhat with CJ's
comments. I have done several flight reviews with such individuals, and
it was not a pleasant experience. The ground review is dominated by them
telling me war stories and never really answering my questions. I try to
be polite and listen to the stories, but my questions go unanswered. It
is a very frustrating experience for me. I had one guy who flew the
entire time with his feet on the floor. However, some of the greatest
pilots I have met are also from the same generation, so I would not
generalize this observation. It is however safe to say that on average we
are training better pilots today than we did several decades ago.




"C J Campbell" wrote in
:


"OtisWinslow" wrote in message
news

"EDR" wrote in message
...
It's about time the Feds require that all students must spend the
first 20 hours of their training in taildraggers. It's the only way
they are going to learn propper control input on landings.

If these CFIs can't train people to properly fly a nose dragger, why
would there be any reason to believe they'd do any better in
a tail dragger. There'd just be more wrecks. I think whoever is
training these people needs a little recurrent training themselves.

There are some people who seem to think that modern flight instructors
do not know how to fly or that they are generally all incompetent. It
is a variant of the old "the next generation is going to hell in a
handbasket" attitude.

The fact is that when these old codgers learned to fly the instructors
really were generally incompetent. They let people solo after an hour
and a half of instruction, there were no standards, and nobody cared
about airspace, radio procedures, or aircraft systems. The accident
rate in those days was five times higher than what it is now. The FAA
was threatening to shut down GA for good.

Now these old-timers go in for their flight reviews and find that they
don't understand the things they should have learned when they first
got into an airplane. They don't know airspace, can't hold heading or
altitude, and their landings can best be described as controlled
crashes. Their judgment is terrible; they will take off into
thunderstorms and fly broken airplanes. Many of them are completely
incapable of landing on a paved runway. They don't like being
criticized by people who could be their own grandchildren and they
don't think 'the kids' have anything to teach them. Most of all, they
don't want to face the truth -- they are incompetent pilots and always
have been.

So they like to say that instructors who don't fly tailwheels or do
loops or who don't do much instruction are better instructors. They
blame the instructors for the fact that they themselves can't fly and
will never learn. EDR's rant is very typical of these people.