(Mark James Boyd) wrote
First of all, I'm VERY pleased that you take the time and effort
to respond to these posts. I hope our back-and-forth is helpful to
others reading this, and I am grateful for your viewpoint and time.

Well, thank you. Somehow I always thought that this was the point of
the forum.

That's a misconception. There is no way for an airline interviewer to
find out that you failed a checkride.

LOL! In many cases the CFI who signed off for the failed checkride
works for the company or is part of the interview team!

Yes, and he's the least likely person to bring it up.

In any case,
lying during an airline interview is considered poor form...

Not a matter of lying - more a matter of it won't be asked. I know a
couple of people who do interviewing, and when they do ask (rarely)
they don't actually care whether the applicant failed - they're using
that as simply one way to put him on the spot, and if that doesn't do
it, they'll do something else.

An airline considers that if a highly qualified pilot
fails an optional checkride late in his career, he doesn't have enough
ability to evaluate his own skills and apply them to a well-defined
standard.

I know quite a few airline people, and this is the first time I've
heard this.

I don't buy that either. There is always a DE in the area. You're
talking about a couple of weeks delay.

I'm talking about satisfaction
within a couple of days, not a couple of weeks.

And dealing with the general public, that might indeed be meaningful.
But if you're dealing with someone who is already an experienced
pilot, you're dealing with someone used to waiting a couple of weeks
for a checkride.

Then why do they need to fly with you? They can already fly solo, and
their recommending CFI can give them an 8710.

Because in the three intervening weeks before the DPE checkride,
they can fly with passengers and get experience.

They can fly solo and get experience as well. And I'm not sure how
valuable 2-33 experience is anyway. I suppose they could teach, but I
do have an issue with this - see below.

If your weather never goes bad, aircraft never break or you have spares,
and nobody ever fails a checkride, this isn't a factor. Otherwise,
the word "hassle" comes into mind.

Yes, but as I noted before, this is a hassle pilots are used to. In
fact, I would argue that since we're mostly focusing on CFI's, this is
a hassle ALL of your potential SP instructors are well used to and
hardly notice.

If you fly out of class D or near it, give the added endorsement.

Well, that's great, but have you seen the requirements for that
endorsement? Neither have I. Want to bet it includes a landing at a
controlled field?

You had this happen once in HOW many hours of flight?

Not that many - I've largely abandoned soaring in favor of power. I
doubt I have even 100 hours in gliders.

If you had
no radio could you have planned the flight differently to avoid
the 4 mile radius circle?

Not realistically. It was the only available airport along the route
- making it unusable meant a significantly increased risk of
outlanding. In fact, not being able to enter the surface area would
have assured an outlanding.

This is a bit moot however, since I'm talking about transition pilots
exclusively, who already have radio experience in another
cat/class. For them I'm likely to just simulate ATC
calls on the ground (always call out "glider - minimum fuel!")
and then sign them off for SP radio endorsement.

That's fine if the regs let you do that.

Again, at my club, the point may be that we triple the number of
available instructors who can fly in the 2-33s.

I have a real problem with this.

Again, we are only talking about transition pilots. They all
have X-C experience. They don't necessarily have
glider XC experience, though. And yes, I'm suggesting
that someone who has never flown a glider XC, but has flown
50+ hours of airplane X-C, can instruct in gliders quite safely.

Safely, yes. Effectively? I don't believe so.

I realize that an instructor shortage does bad things to a club. I
can certainly see the motivation to make CFIG's out of power CFI's who
join the club. Unfortunately, this is not the winning strategy you
might think. Who wants to be taught by someone who has been flying
gliders for a week? Sure, it's possible - a current and proficient
power CFI can join a club, solo in half a dozen flights, make three
solo flights and get his SP-glider, and at exactly 15 flights in
gliders can become a CFI-SP-G. What's more, he is probably safe. He
can teach aircraft handling - takeoff, tow, maneuvers, and landing.
But he can't teach soaring.

For a proficient and reasonably experienced fixed wing pilot, even
getting
a full-blown CFIG is laughably easy even if he only holds a private
ticket in
airplanes. I took my initial commercial and CFI in a glider, and the
total instruction and practice time including both checkrides came out
to significantly less than 10 hours. The writtens and checkrides were
a cakewalk. Getting a CFI-SP-G for a current power CFI should be a
matter of days - and he can quite comfortably teach gliding.

Having a couple of instructors like that is not a big deal - there are
a lot of things to teach in presolo training other than soaring. In
the short run,
it reduces instructor workload and/or makes instruction more
available, thus making recruitment of new members easier.

But if such instructors become a significant chunk of the staff, a
certain attitude begins to permeate the flight training. Soaring
opportunities are ignored in training unless they are spectacular (and
maybe even then) and the
soaring characteristics of the trainers are ignored as well. Of
course the 2-33 is probably the second worst soaring trainer available
- the 2-22 being the worst. Maybe it gets the students to solo (and
maybe even the private certificate) faster, and safety is not
compromised, but they don't learn the skills necessary to stay up in
anything less than ideal conditions, and thus
lack the skills necessary to advance to XC. They fly circles around
the home field for a while and get bored. Some quit, others fly a few
hours a year and never progress. This is poor retention, and it means
there's no possibility of having a pool of experienced active pilots
from which instructors can be drawn.

Of course that means you never can grow enough instructors in the
club, and are even more dependent on bringing in power CFI's. And the
vicious circle begins anew.

Apparently the FAA agrees, since there is no glider or CFI - G
X-C flight experience requirement whatsoever.

The FAA is not concerned with the growth or decline of soaring - and I
have no doubt that an experienced power CFI can get to a point where
he can safely teach glider handling in a matter of only a few hours -
especially if the glider we're talking about is a 2-33.

I think the 2-33 is a better primary trainer. I can safely
solo someone with no prior experience faster in the 2-33, and
transition pilots safely faster in a 2-33, than I can in the
Blanik.

No question of it. The 2-33 is less demanding to fly. The problem is
that it's much more demanding to soar - high sink rate, poor glide
ratio, nil penetration. So you will accelerate solo - and maybe
getting the license - but at the cost of delaying the teaching of
soaring.

I think your approach might have significant value for ab-initio
training in gliders - where the initial goal is to impart safe
aircraft handling skills, like takeoff, tow, pattern, and landing.
The inexperienced glider pilot who has become an instructor could
effectively and safely teach these things in the mornings and
evenings, when there's no lift to work anyway. Maybe he could use the
middle of the day, when there is lift, to develop his own soaring
skills. If you organize it correctly, it could work.

I expect, however, that the reality will be very different. I expect
that you're going to see instructors with very marginal soaring
ability and no XC experience at all training glider pilots who can
only stay up under ideal conditions and can't go XC at all. These
pilots will then get bored and quit or fly very little.

I have to add that I think it's a bit about marketing too.
... the main thing is I couldn't
draw them in with the whole DPE checkride business, and now I
can draw them in and get them halfway there and
make the next step look much smaller.

My experience with power pilots interested in soaring is this - NONE
of them are concerned about taking a checkride. They've all taken
checkrides before, and consider them no big deal. The things that
keep them out of soaring (and some actually have ratings) have to do
with hassles they're not used to, not the checkride hassles they ARE
used to.

Little steps. This is why I'm pushing the FAA to allow
endorsements for adding privileges to SP power too.
It makes sense to have an endorsement for night, and
for lower visibility, once the CFI has trained
the SP to those sections outlined in the Private
pilot areas (3 hrs night, 3 hrs instrument respectively).

Actually I would be VERY uncomfortable with granting night privileges
without any instrument training - were it up to me, MVFR and VFR-OTT
would be the same endorsement (requiring the 3 hours of instrument and
a proficiency check) and would be a pre-requisite for the night
endorsement. But that's a quibble - I agree with your basic approach,
I merely disagree that night flight can safely be accomplished without
emergency instrument skills.

But there really needs to be a reasonable change in requirements to
justify the change in privileges. I just don't see that happening for
the glider ratings. For power ratings, it is huge.

Michael