"Andrew Gideon" wrote in message
online.com...
Dudley Henriques wrote:

What I said was that I had never flown with a product of an
accelerated
basic training program where that pilot didn't in my opinion need
remedial training to bring them up to what I consider to be
appropriate
comprehension standards.
This shouldn't be read to imply that these pilots were unsafe. It
should
however be interpreted to mean that in my opinion, these pilots
might
have had better comprehension had they not taken the accelerated
route.

Why is the PPL exam set permitting people to become pilots with a
level of
comprehension you find inappropriate?

- Andrew

Just because I found the comprehension levels "inappropriate" shouldn't
be misconstrued into meaning that I believe the flight test standards
were lax. This wasn't the case at all. I would consider the standards to
be an established MINIMUM for defining a safe pilot. What I am saying is
that in my experience, the comprehensive levels of the accelerated
trainees could have been BETTER!!!!
My standards are fairly high it's true, especially for my airplanes, but
they are not so high that I wouldn't check out a safe pilot who I felt
simply needed remedial work on his comprehension.

My usual method was to simply spend the time necessary with the pilot
and bring them up to speed on anything I found during the check flight
that I thought was out of line with that pilot's experience level.
The rub on all this is that many of the things that I discovered needing
some work were not critical things necessarily, but rather things that I
felt a pilot at the level of experience I was checking should know. A
lot of it had to do with the depth of the understanding, rather than the
total absence of comprehension.
Being safe is one thing. Being evaluated by a check pilot looking for a
specific depth of comprehension to match your hours of experience is
quite a different thing. All of us, including me, can use more
comprehension. What I was finding was a pilot who I felt should be
understanding what was happening at a deeper depth than I was getting
for the rating held and the hours flown. You could classify it as
something I felt the pilot should know more about than I was getting
from him. Nothing critical, just something I wasn't getting from a lot
of the pilots who were coming through the program taking a little more
time BETWEEN FLIGHTS!!!!
Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship
Commercial Pilot/ CFI Retired
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