Good Instructors...

In article k.net, Dudley Henriques wrote:

First of all, there is absolutely nothing involved in owning an airplane
that makes one better or not better qualified as an
instructor....absolutely nothing.

There are things you learn about flying by going places that you don't
learn sitting in the training environment. None of it's on the PTS,
but it's vital information if you're going to fly out beyond hectobuck-
burger range. This is objective truth.

If you don't fly long trips, you just won't know what you're missing.
As a renter pilot, such trips are inaccessible or prohibitive. As
graduate student, er, instructor, most "timebuilders" just won't have
the money to pay for this kind of training, and it doesn't advance
their careers.


Secondly, I have known many instructors through my career in aviation
who have done nothing but teach who are in my opinion among the finest
CFI's I've ever known in professional aviation.

I'm sure you have. But you can be an expert in something specialized
and less than completely knowledgable in something related.

Pick an example. Say an instructor chose to specialize in primary
training. Such an instructor would probably be a bad choice to go
with for instrument training.


Any statement that a private pilot with 1000 hours could be a good
instructor based on that qualification alone is so ridiculous I won't
even address it, and I sincerely hope that the people on this group are
smart enough to realize that this is pure nonsense.

I didn't make the statement, so I don't have to defend it, but it's
not _pure_ nonsense. Rather, it's mildly impure nonsense. IOW,
there is a grain of something useful there. It's safe to assume that
someone with 1000 hours of actually going places has learned something
worth teaching to to someone who wants to use an airplane to actually
go places. Whether that alone makes them competent at teaching is
another thing entirely.


All this being said, really good instructors are unfortunately the
minority in the CFI community, but pilots who generalize about

You can pretty much generalize that to any area of teaching.


The time builders have always been with us and always will be with us as
long as giving dual is the cheap path to a building block system that
requires the time being spent in the air to qualify for bigger and
better things. There's a pertinent point that should be made about this.
Being a time builder doesn't necessarily disqualify a specific CFI as
being on the negative side of the quality equation! This is important to

Absolutely. I've met more conscientious and less conscientious
instructors, but I've generally been lucky with the ones I've had.
You don't need kilo-hours and kilo-mile trips to be a good instructor
for primary training (to pick a random example). And a good primary
instructor doesn't need to be a good instrument instructor.


Morris