(reply crossposted to rec.aviation.student)

Michael's post is spot on. Personal recommendations are the only way to
go. I asked a similar question a year ago and got mostly similar
answers about interviewing a bunch of instructors etc, but I didn't find
that advice helpful. Has anyone here actually tried it? I'm sure it
can be pulled off by a sufficiently charismatic person, but for me it
felt socially awkward in the extreme. Also, if you're looking for that
elusive retired guy teaching for the love of it, you're not going to
find him/her in the yellow pages.

I went through three instructors in my first three hours (two greenhorn
time-builders and a crotchety guy who couldn't teach), decided at over
$100 a shot I was throwing away my money, and quit. A year and a half
later on a whim I sent an e-mail in the blind to the author of an online
aviation site (a nuclear physicist by trade) asking if he by chance knew
an instructor in my area he could personally recommend. He said no but
passed me on to a local pilot/acro instructor in the area (himself a
nationally prominent professor of computer science by trade) who in turn
recommended a woman who is actually a flight instructor by trade. It
turns out she is excellent, and one of her two greenhorn apprentices is
not bad at all, and I'm doing a much better job of learning with them.
(Elaine Heston, Aeroexecutive Services, inc. at Rostraver Airport south
of Pittsburgh, 724-379-4722)

It turns out if I had asked around the local EAA chapter I would have
found the same woman as half of them are her students, but the couple
local pilots I knew at the time didn't have any personal recommendations
to make.

So, to sum up, the approach that worked for me was to first find a
prominent local pilot (or group) well keyed-in to the local instructor
scene, and ask that person or people for personal recommendations. The
hard problem is not comparing the instructors you find against each
other, but rather finding any instructor at all who stands out as good.
Certainly blowing a couple hundred dollars on bad instructors helped
me to recognize a keeper....

~Adam

Michael wrote:
Is it really "buyer beware" ?


It is to a large extent. Having a flight instructor certificate
assures a certain minimum standard, but it's very minimal.

The best advice I can give you is this - figure out the sort of pilot
you want to be in five or ten years (meet the pilots based at your
airport to get an idea) and then ask THAT pilot to choose your
instructor. He already has a pretty good idea of what to look for -
you don't.

It's a matter of perspective. By the time you've figured out how to
choose a good instructor, it's not so useful.

Michael