Bush flying training.

[TheNorthman]

I'm not 100% sure but in other countries such as Britain aren't they trained by high time pilots right off the hop?

It's pretty much the same deal in the UK, you get your Commercial Licence then (if you choose to go the instructor route) you get your Instructors Rating and off you go.

Only difference in the UK is that you can initially only teach people to get their Private Pilots Licence, you then need to build up experience in instructing before you can teach people for the Commercial Licence and advanced ratings like Multi Engine and Instrument Ratings.

In the UK it's even harder to build up those PIC hours so a lot of people choose to go the instructor route. Just because somebodies young and relatively inexperienced though doesn't mean to say they'll be a bad instructor.

[Cat Driver]

Well if you have high time experienced instructors who are good at what they are doing the PPL students should finish close to the minimum times Transport Canada lays out in the training program.

Not twice the time.

So even paying the instructor twice the normal rate would still save forty five hours of airplane rental.

Then again I am getting a bit old and maybe senility is creeping in.

[trey kule]

Just because somebodies young and relatively inexperienced though doesn't mean to say they'll be a bad instructor.

Logically , that is true.
The issue is there are enough out there who are not good instructors to generalize with a fair amount of accuracy.

The problem is not so much age or experience,particularly in teaching at the ppl level.
It is attitude.
A great many of those young instructors are just passing through. Building time is their objective, not teaching their students. Sit in an instructors' lounge some time and you wont hear much talk about teaching methods or discussing how to deal with a student's training difficulty, but you will hear lots about this or that company that is hiring . Or how to fly this or that bigger, faster, shiny aircraft

What do I mean about attitude....look at the quote above. "Relatively inexperienced"..,
That is attitude...at 250 hours you are inexperienced. Period. Again maybe relative to someone with zero hours you are not, but to teach, you are inexperienced.
And again, that is not necessarily a problem, but it is an indicator of a lack of understanding about the importance of experience.

There is a real opportunity for retirees to give back, but after looking at it myself, the working conditions were just not there. (I did find a couple of very nice exceptions to this)

[SuperchargedRS]

Just because somebodies young and relatively inexperienced though doesn't mean to say they'll be a bad instructor.

Logically , that is true.
The issue is there are enough out there who are not good instructors to generalize with a fair amount of accuracy.

The problem is not so much age or experience,particularly in teaching at the ppl level.
It is attitude.
A great many of those young instructors are just passing through. Building time is their objective, not teaching their students. Sit in an instructors' lounge some time and you wont hear much talk about teaching methods or discussing how to deal with a student's training difficulty, but you will hear lots about this or that company that is hiring . Or how to fly this or that bigger, faster, shiny aircraft

What do I mean about attitude....look at the quote above. "Relatively inexperienced"..,
That is attitude...at 250 hours you are inexperienced. Period. Again maybe relative to someone with zero hours you are not, but to teach, you are inexperienced.
And again, that is not necessarily a problem, but it is an indicator of a lack of understanding about the importance of experience.

There is a real opportunity for retirees to give back, but after looking at it myself, the working conditions were just not there. (I did find a couple of very nice exceptions to this)

There's MUCH more that goes into it other than flight hours, you can have 20,000hrs flight time and be a absolute crap instructor, teaching and doing are DIFFERENT skill sets. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you're for a crap at teaching it, and vise versa too.

[Lees147]

My experience with flying has been very brief but I decided to fly because out of the blue I developed a huge fear of flying (quite literally in the middle of the air @ 37000 feet on around my 10th commercial flight, huge panic attack).

Where some people might try to avoid flying I ended up going down the route of getting into a tiny tin can and taking it up to the sky.

It greatly helped that my instructor was not my junior, I would have felt much worse having to get into the said tin can with a teenager/young man. Would it have been less safe? probably not, but we know that stress has huge impacts on someones ability to fly never mind learning to fly at the same time as being stressed.

I think the maturity sometimes is bigger than the age/experience itself. I've heard many stories of instructors performing power off stalls in the first flight. It takes a bit of time for people to feel comfortable being in the air and it should be a more natural slow build of confidence than the macho "look what I can get this plane to do".

Maybe this is also because of my age when learning to fly because I definitely wouldn't have been fearful or awe inspired when I was 15.

[TheNorthman]

The problem is not so much age or experience,particularly in teaching at the ppl level.
It is attitude

You are absolutely correct with that, and I've got to agree with you when you say most young instructors talk about which companies are hiring etc. The thing is though that doesn't mean that they're just there to milk the students out of every hour they can so that they can make their own logbooks look nice and fat.

I can only talk from my own experience, when I was a young(ish) instructor (I was 27 at the time so maybe not the very young instructors you're talking about) I worked at a flying school and with the exception of a couple of 'retired, just doing it for the fun of it types' all the instructors were relatively young (about 22 to 28).

A lot of the time we talked about trying to get airline jobs ( that and 'I'm so poor I kicked a bin down the road, somebody asked me what I was doing and I said moving house' type jokes ) but that didn't mean that we weren't absolutely dedicated to being the best instructors we could be and trying to teach our students the best ways we could.

Something you've got to remember as well is that a lot of the students who are learning are young (and obviously inexperienced) as well and may prefer to be taught by someone they can relate too, i.e somebody who isn't so experienced and comfortable with aviating that they might struggle to understand why a student is struggling with learning something which to them has been incredibly easy for years.

Just as a student who is a little bit older may struggle to accept being taught by somebody much younger than themselves (only natural), a student who is quite young may struggle to be taught by somebody who is much older than themselves. As long as the instructor knows his stuff and is capable of communicating it, then the best instructor for a particular student is going to depend on the particulars of the student.

When it comes to doing 'Advanced Training' though I totally agree that as long as the instructor is capable of teaching in a good way, then the more experience the instructor has the better.

Where some people might try to avoid flying I ended up going down the route of getting into a tiny tin can and taking it up to the sky.

Good on ya for that

[Shiny Side Up]

Only difference in the UK is that you can initially only teach people to get their Private Pilots Licence, you then need to build up experience in instructing before you can teach people for the Commercial Licence and advanced ratings like Multi Engine and Instrument Ratings.

Actually its the same here though the words of the regulations might be different. You can't teach CPL students until you have a Class 3 instructor rating which means you have at least 330 hours total time. In practice though this is usually more since you have the solo and flight test recommends to acquire as well. I don't think I upgraded until I was over 1000 hours. But that also depends on the type of school one works for, puppy mill instructors upgrade faster than non puppy mill ones.

To teach advanced ratings (seaplane, multi and multi-IFR) you need fifty hours on type, and unless a pilot was significantly blessed as a student it unlikely they'd acquire those during their CPL training, but rather after. Now that all said, its not a lot of extra experience that one has to gain to be legally qualified to teach these things. When its often trotted out that it would benefit the instructing world to only have 1000 hour plus instructors, I'd counter that's what it should be to upgrade to the class 3. But then not to stick people in the class 4 slave route I think we'd also have to revisit the rules of direct supervision as well.

[digits_]

Only difference in the UK is that you can initially only teach people to get their Private Pilots Licence, you then need to build up experience in instructing before you can teach people for the Commercial Licence and advanced ratings like Multi Engine and Instrument Ratings.

Actually its the same here though the words of the regulations might be different. You can't teach CPL students until you have a Class 3 instructor rating

Where does it say that ? CPL requirements just talk about instruction from a flight instructor.

[Shiny Side Up]

My bad, never mind. I was thinking of something else. Class 4s can instruct for CPLs. Probably shouldn't but that's another matter. I was thinking about the ab initio requirement to upgrade.