Ontario instructor wages - 2018

[Chuck Ellsworth]

L.C. has hit the nail on the ass, the only thing he did not mention was before you can apply to the instructor school you must be able to prove xxx years / hours of experience as a working pilot.

[John Swallow]

There is no doubt that a dedicated course to turn out instructors to a common standard would be beneficial. 

The military turned out a pretty good product "back in the day".  I remember  2-3 week course learning how to effectively teach ground school and the various methods of presenting material.

That was followed by a 2 month flying course that included about 80 hours of flying.  The first half of the course was proficiency - bringing all candidates up to a common standard.  If you didn't meet the standard, you didn't continue to the second phase:  that of how to become an effective and competent flying instructor.  It was intensive.

Successful completion of the course was rewarded with a "C" Category Instuctor qualification stamped on your left buttock.  (Or placed in your logbook; it WAS a long time ago!)

[Colonel]

Military flight training is so different from civilian flight training ....

In the military, the candidates are carefully selected for
aptitude and they are all young and healthy and fast and
highly motivated.

Their full-time job is to learn to fly, and they have no
distractions to keep them from it.  They learn over a
very short, intense session.

The training is tightly scripted and any problems are
immediately addressed.

Pretty well everything above is the [b]exact opposite[/b] of
civilian flight training, which is a train wreck.

Civilian flight training is a really weird service business,
where if you are mean to the customer because he was
stupid and needs to learn a lesson to survive, he doesn't
come back any more.

Civilian flight training loves poor students that take too
long to learn, because it's great income for them.

Given all the above ....

To be a [i]good[/i] flight instructor, you need two things:

1) solid knowledge of the fundamentals of aviation and to be a skilled pilot with superb timing

2) the ability to teach

#1 and #2 above are completely orthogonal.  My
father was both a military and civilian flight instructor,
and while he was one of the best sticks I have ever
seen, he was really not a very good teacher.  He didn't
want to be, because in his world a good pilot was on
squadron.

I have buckets of knowledge and skill in the cockpit - I
never really found flying very hard ... my father referred
to me as a natural pilot, whatever that is - but I was not
the best teacher.  It did not come easily to me, and frankly
I never got really good at it.  As an instructor, my aviation
knowledge and skill compensated a bit for my weak teaching
skills.  I had six months of teaching experience, literally
repeated 50 times over.

[img width=500 height=343]https://theoldfellowgoesrunning.files.w ... riving.jpg[/img]

Back to the real world, and a 250TT CPL getting a class 4.

What a train wreck.  He has very little knowledge and skill
of aviation, and probably not much in the way of teaching
ability, except perhaps by accident.

It's a wonder anyone learns to fly, when you think about it.

I have a theory that people teach themselves to fly, and
the job of the instructor is simply to [b]sit there and stop
them from killing themselves[/b].  When the student has
learned enough to stop killing himself, it's time for the
instructor to step out of the cockpit and allow the student
to keep flying and teaching himself.  We all know that a
PPL with 1000TT is a horse of a different color than one
with 50TT, and it's the time he's spent teaching himself
that is the difference.  If he lives, anyways.

Data point:  BD Maule, the man who built one of my airplanes
(I love it - I've been flying it for 47 years now) taught himself
to fly by reading a book.  And that was on those horrible pieces
of shit they had back then.  The airplanes, not the book.

[url=http://mauleairinc.com/history/]http://mauleairinc.com/history/[/url]

What a fine man.  He liked me, for some odd reason that I've
never fathomed.  People either really like me or really hate me.

tl;dr

I think we set the bar too high for instructors.  All they really
need to do is stop the students from killing themselves too
often to increase the insurance rates.  Yes, this is less efficient
than good teaching, but we all know that efficiency is simply
not important.  200TT to PPL is fine in the 21st century.  Once
you accept that as axiomatic, you begin to realize the implications
of it:

[b]Good instruction is nice, but not necessary.[/b]

Plenty of good pilots have suffered through some really awful
flight instruction, and learned to fly quite well despite it.  It's
quite possible you're one of them.