"C J Campbell" wrote
Frankly, Michael, you seem to hang out with a rough crowd. You keep saying
that the flight instructors are all incompetent, as are all the pilots, the
FAA, the mechanics, and everybody else.

That's fascinating. You have google available - please cite one place
where I said that. If the word "all" is not included, it's not a
cite.

Don't have one? Didn't think so.

Are you the only person in the whole
world who is able to do his job?

Nah. Lots are. For example, note the list of highly qualified
10,000+ hour instructors who trained me. BTW, none of them include
non-pilot time in that total.

There are even competent people in the FAA, much as it pains me to say
it. I've only ever met one, but I have many friends in the airline
business who claim to have met many, and I have no reason to doubt
their veracity.

But there is something special about GA. It's not really an industry
- it's more like a disease. Most of us involved in it know full well
that it's not a viable way to make a living. Most, but not all.

How do you make a small fortune in GA? Start with a large one, and
know when to quit. It's a cliche, but it didn't get to be a cliche by
being wrong. Once in a while someone manages to find a specialized
niche and do well with it (a few of them post here - Jim Weir and Paul
Sanchez are good examples), but most people who decide to make a
living in GA fall into the otherwise unemployable category.

I've known many excellent A&P mechanics. Few of them were interested
in doing general retail GA work for a living. One ran a specialty
restoration shop, one was a retired director of maintenance for a
major airline, one was an airline pilot who ran an FBO one the side,
and a few were owners who got the rating to be able to work on their
own stuff and help friends. Most of the really good A&P mechanics who
actually want to make a living of it wind up with the airlines or the
local automobile dealership. More money, fewer hassles. Can't blame
them, really. Very few owners in GA will pay what it costs to do
things right, and most of the ones who understand what doing it right
means in the first place are going to do it themselves. The ones who
are left, well, a handful are there because they really like messing
around with little airplanes, but most are not otherwise employable.

What does doing it right mean, anyway? Realize that most of these
planes are old, and have systems that have been patched and modified
many times, sometimes incompetently, and were often poorly designed in
the first place. As a result, they are fragile, and must be handled
with care. Care means time. If a guy advertises a
pitot/static/transponder check for under $200, you know something is
wrong. Think about it - he has an investment in equipment and labor
at least as great as an automotive safety/emissions inspection
station. Those guys inspect your car in 20 minutes and charge $40 to
do it (this is Houston-specific, but I doubt it's much different in
other major cities). That means the guy had to be able to pull and
check your transponder, encoder, ASI and altimeter and do your
paperwork in well under two hours to make it all work out. Is there
time to do all that CAREFULLY in less than two hours? Of course not.
So he either has to 'find' a problem and charge you to fix it, or he
has to rush the job and most likely break something. But if he was
up-front and charged what it really cost to do it right, he would lose
business to the lower-dollar competitors. Pilots are notoriously
cheap. Someone who is competent and honest will soon get disgusted
with this and leave the industry, so mostly we have the people who
didn't get disgusted and stayed.

I've known many excellent CFI's. These included airline and military
pilots, aerobatic competitors, and even some non-professional pilots
who had flown for years, accumulated many hundreds of hours of
experience flying all over the country, and had a desire to pass on
their knowledge and experience. Few of them were interested in doing
retail instruction, and none were interested in instructing full-time.
They would teach because they enjoyed teaching, when they felt like
it. Of course with that kind of attitude, they weren't too popular
with FBO's that were trying to run a business (not a hobby operation).
Most active instructors are building time for the airlines, and are
not otherwise employable in aviation. Most of them leave as soon as
they can get any other aviation job. The ones who display a
willingness to learn and a reasonable clue level get hired early
(connections also help) so a high-hours full-time CFI is actually a
red flag. You have to ask yourself WHY he is still a full-time CFI.
It could be skeletons in the closet (I knew a good instructor who
couldn't get hired until the incident where he buzzed boats on a lake
went off his record) or immigration issues, but more likely it's
because the professional pilots doing the hiring can spot him as a
loser from a mile away and don't want him in their fleet.

Interestingly, I have known VERY few bad/incompetent glider
instructors and even the very worst I've encountered were above
average for power instructors in terms of skill, knowledge, and
experience. There is a simple reason - glider instruction is not a
stepping stone to the airlines. As a result, the average glider
instructor is an accomplished professional in his field. That field
might be aviation, or it might not.

Michael