5. I could have sent him solo sooner, but there is such a thing as a curriculum and I made him complete it.
This brings up a point I always wonder about when it comes to people going solo fast. For those who claim such short times I'd be interested in flight by flight, hour by hour how the student did and the excersises covered. Personally though I've came close, I'd be hard pressed getting everything in there in less than 9 hours even should I have ideal conditions for the student to go solo. Even looking at the upper air excersises and the circuit lessons alone we're looking pressed for time. I should say as well that I have fairly ideal conditions of a quiet airport and a close practice area to work within. With that in mind students usually solo in the 12 to 15 hour range which falls well within a reasonable time reference for completing a licence.
So how did you guys do it?
To answer another question:
How did he/she get and keep an instructors rating if he/she was universally considered a moron?
Or is moron the minimum intelligence allowed to be a flight instructor in Canada?
To be blunt, there is no minimum intelligence requirement. There exists the possibility that someone may indeed defeat the system by pure luck. Just like a million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually produce all of Shakespere's works. There is the possibility that an idiot through sheer preserverence (which will increase the time the idiot will spend making the attempt - remember the monkeys
eventually manifest the work - but will also increase the probability of the idiot succeeding). It doesn't help that the testing and prerequisites are somewhat inadequate - much like if you accepted the monkey's work if you were content that they just got most of Hamlet produced.
What this means is that the quality control for flight instructing out there falls largely in the laps of the Chief Flight Instructors out there - which keep in mind are 1) produced by the same testing system as above, 2) Chosen largely by their abilities as managers, not necessarily as fliers or instructors, and 3) is one of the least sought after posts in aviation being that the rise in responsibility is usually considerably greater than the rise in pay as well as usually meaning a reduction in the much sought after flying hours.
Long story short, the "morons" are being oversaw by largely pilots who don't especially want to be overseers. The so-called policing that TC does of the matter is largely tossed in their laps.
