Lets have a serious discussion on learning to fly.

[Colonel]

It doesn’t matter what airport you learned to fly at.
It doesn’t matter what flight school.
It doesn’t matter what airplane.

The only thing that matters is the instructor.

A good instructor has to know the material
and be able to transfer his knowledge and skills.

Everything else is bullshit.

[Colonel]

I should mention the above is true for any given student.

Although we are not supposed to mention it, students
are not all the same.

A student with buckets of aptitude and motivation will
always progress faster than a student that does not have
these two characteristics, which can be wildly decoupled.

For any given student, aptitude decreases with age, at
a rate that is a function of the student.

[Liquid Charlie]

We all agree that a good start to improve standards is that instructors need to be better trained themselves and more experience required before they can actually be instructors and along with this salaries that allows one to actually live and have a comfortable life if one choses to be a instructor as a profession.


I think the next issue is how to get the schools from being strictly "puppy" mills and finally but likely most important, to improve "stick and rudder" skills.


Obviously, things have changed and some are the accident statistics of the past were directly related to how aviation was back then. I recently mentioned that when I started to fly for a living we had no radios and no instruments other than needle ball airspeed and while some in the group were horrified there were actually a couple who totally believed I was bullshitting. We were turned loose and surviving your first year was a milestone. Most did and unfortunately some didn't. I was fortunate enough to work for a good little airline with experienced pilots who kicked my ass when they saw me doing something they didn't like -- mostly wx related. I was a time of "ass of your pants" flying, scud running, not even knowing gross take off weight of your aircraft and only knowing that all aircraft had standard loads based on what they could carry and not necessarily on what their actual gross weight was, pilots and fuel had no weight. Most had very good to above average stick and rudder skills.


Fast forward to today, things have improved with wx and aircraft loading but how pilots progress is very different. Back in the day we made captain(in all my experience I have done direct entry captain except for doing 500 f/0 to get enough turbojet time to meet company matrix for upgrade) , now for the most part we are making F/O's that are doing direct entry into high performance aircraft under 704/705.


Very few of the new generation want to go "north" and want to have their city living.


Just to take a complete drift here -- fires at Brit and Alban, calling it "northern" ontario -- I'm wiping the coffee off my computer screen -- LMFAOOOooooo