Where are the CFIG's?

(Mark James Boyd) wrote
He should join the club and learn how to
fly from someone that knows how to teach flying and has the proper
ratings.

Sean Tucker and Wayne Handley might disagree. Neither have
"the proper ratings." The insurance companies and the FAA cares
not even a whit.

Excellent point. These people actually charge money for instruction.
They consider the flight instructor certificate basically irrelevant.
As the holder of a flight instructor certificate, I must agree.

Some people can teach. Some cannot. Some can fly safely. Some
cannot. A piece of paper changes this little. The astonishing
variance in standards enforced by different paid CFIs and DPEs will
make this true for the forseeable future.

The reality is that it's even worse. Training to be a flight
instructor really doesn't include any training in how to recover from
student errors in critical flight situations. It probably should, but
it's not in the PTS, so for the forseeable future it's not going to.

This causes the production of some instructors who can fly the PTS
maneuvers perfectly as they describe them, but are afraid of letting
the student fly in any critical situation, such as takeoff and
landing. We've all seen them. Fortunately, most of them eventually
figure out that instructing isn't for them and let their CFI tickets
lapse, especially in soaring where there isn't a professional reason
to keep the ticket. In power instruction, some of these people keep
plugging at it, and are generally known as the ones who can't keep
their hands off the controls.

My own theory is that the worst students make the best instructors,
and vice versa. Someone who has made the aircraft do all kinds of
ugly things over and over before he got it right knows just how bad it
can look and still come out OK, and is thus comfortable letting a
student do something really ugly. The result is that the student can
keep flying long enough to see his own mistake and learn from it,
rather than hearing a lot of "I got it" from the instructor.

PIC is PIC.

Exactly right. Regardless of who is manipulating the controls, the
PIC retains absolute authority and total responsibility for the
flight. Letting someone else manipulate the controls doesn't change
that one bit.

Michael