"Trying out" a different insturctor just to see - good idea? Badidea?

"GEG" wrote in message
...
I'm curious to know if it's a bad idea to "try" another
instructor for a flight, just to see.

It's an excellent idea to try different instructors. When I was a PPL I had
one "primary" instructor, plus one "secondary" who took me for about eight
hours when the primary guy was on his hols. I also went for occasional
one-off trips with about four others when the first two were
ill/unavailable.

Different instructors have different experiences and different opinions
about how to do stuff. While there are many aspects of flying where you
should do what the book says (how to climb/descend, how to recover from a
stall, and all that), when it comes to stuff like forced landings or
crosswind approaches there's no right answer (or, more often, there are
several right answers) and so you learn from the experiences of the people
you fly with. I was taught more than one way to proceed with a forced
landing, and the way I do them is an amalgamation of the approaches. And
having learned two ways to do a crosswind approach, I find one easier than
the other.

So yes, go with different people. The important thing, though, is to ensure
that the people you go with are aware of what stage you're at in your
training - otherwise it's like doing several completely separate courses. My
school/club keeps detailed, honest notes of each training flight, so that
any instructor taking a student up knows exactly what you've done and how
good you are at it, and thus the students get the maximum value from the
flights.

On the flip side, if it's at the same school, will I create an
adversarial or acrimonious situation by "cheating" on my instructor -
who I'm actually quite fine with?

Quite the opposite. When I was getting toward the end of my IMC rating
training, my instructor sent me off with another instructor for an IMC trip
to an airfield some way away, because he wanted to see (a) how I'd manage
with someone I didn't know particularly well in the right-hand seat; and (b)
what an independent instructor would think of my abilities. Similarly, when
I was doing my PPL training, I was introduced to my "secondary" instructor
by the primary one - and rather spookily, the latter had taught the former
to fly helicopters when they were both in the RAF in the 1960s!

D.