It's up
to you how you teach, but I'm glad my CFI had a more realistic
attitude.........

Just remember - not everyone can really tell you what happens
realistically, and some people do try to be holier than the pope (or in
this case the FAA administrator). Not even the FAA inspectors really
take all this stuff to that kind of extreme until they want to get you.

I recall the morning of my initial CFI checkride. It was the first
(and only, out of a dozen) checkride I took not with a DE, but with a
real live FAA inspector. The had to ship him out from another FSDO,
because I chose to do my initial CFI in a glider (it was new and very
hard to ground), and we didn't have a glider-qualified inspector in our
FSDO. I requested one in August, and finally got one in November. Of
course, to be honest, this was 2001 so the little matter of 9/11 did
throw things into disarray.

We met at 8:00 AM. I can't say I wasn't extremely nervous. I knew FAA
inspectors breathed fire and ate babies for sport, and would pin you to
the wall for least little violation of FAR's. Over the course of the
oral I relaxed - clearly this wasn't that kind of inspector. Yes, he
expected me to know all sorts of stuff - but he clearly wasn't out to
get me, just there to make sure I really knew it.

Then he asked to see the aircraft documents. He checked to see that it
was in annual (and agreed that no 100-hour was necessary for us to fly)
and had the proper registration, airworthiness certificate, and flight
manual - and finally asked me to work a W&B.

"I weight 215 lbs" I said (anyone who has ever met me knows this is
bull****). "What do you weigh?"
"What do you think I weigh?" he asked, and didn't quite wink. OK... I
remembered that the L-23 we would fly had a useful load of right around
415 lbs. Of course this was a semi-aerobatic glider, with a max
loading over 5 gees, so I wasn't terribly worried about the wings
coming off. With the soft grass, I also wasn't worried about
overstressing the gear. The gentleman from the FAA easily looked like
he wighted 230-250 lbs, but I confidently said...
"Oh, right around 200 lbs."
"Yep, that's right" he said, and we both knew he was lying.
I checked to make sure I had the latest data, worked the convoluted
graphical W&B in the flight manual - and came up just about a pound
over gross. Oops. Of course he had watched me do it and explain what
I was doing.
"You know, maybe I made a bit of a mistake. I think you really weigh
about 198 lbs." I said with a straight face.
"I think you're right," he said, with an equally straight face. "I
just went to the bathroom."
So I reworked the W&B with him at 198 lbs and me at 215, and sure
enough we were just under - and well within the cg limits. (In fact,
we were well within cg limits even at our real weights).
And then we went out and we flew the glider. And by noon, I was a
certificated flight instructor with glider rating.

I always find it just a little bit amusing when people try to be holier
than the FAA. Even the people who make and enforce these rules know
they're not meant to be followed 100% of the time to the letter, any
more than traffic rules and speed limits. In those situations where
the operation is under scrutiny and can't just ignore the ones that
don't make sense (high visibility stuff like transoceanic, Part 135,
etc) the FAA issues waivers and whatever other sort of authorization
makes sense. For low visibility stuff like my initial CFI checkride,
we just winked and ignored it.

It's only when someone int he FAA wants to get you that the rules come
into play - and then they'll find a way to bust you in any case -
careless and reckless if nothing else.

Michael