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CBJSprague24 posted:Anybody have any other check instructor horror stories worth sharing? I seem to have a disproportionate number of bad ride stories. My commercial ride was done by a guy who was on the north side of 70, which in and of itself isn't unusual but in his case, the years had not been kind to his mind. Numerous times throughout the flight, he would interrupt the exam and say, "that was well done, but in reality this is what you should do...", then he would ask for a control handoff to demonstrate something that was absolutely not in the Flight Test Standards. I will admit that most of the stuff he demonstrated was useful, but I felt it went way outside the scope of what we were trying to do that day. Back on the ground, he and my instructor argued almost incessantly about his marking scheme; it turns out he tried to dock marks for maneuvers that I did that complied with the FTS, but not his own made-up standard. Ultimately the examiner relented on nearly every point, but the debriefing was longer than the actual flight because of it. My multi-engine ride was unremarkable, apart from the fact that the examiner. This guy pretty much looked and acted like he just walked off the set of a late 1970s porn movie, moustache and all; he even drove a C3 Corvette with side pipes and white-lettered tires. Even more incredible was the fact that before the flight, he took a wad of chew that was literally the size of a golf ball and jammed it into his mouth...he never spat once either.  All of these are dwarfed by the clusterfuck that was my initial multi-instrument ride. First of all, I was doing a personal favour by helping out a former instructor of mine get certified as a DFTE, so not only was I to have a normal examiner in the aircraft, the examiner was going to have an examiner of their own (who is actually an employee of Transport Canada, rather than an independent contractor)...talk about added pressure! Hope for a prompt and straightforward resolution evaporated quickly, as a combination of poor weather and broken aircraft caused us to cancel the flight seven times, which also blew through the TC examiner's window, as she went off on holidays. Queue attempt number eight; to make this all go off, we needed to do the test out of the international airport in Calgary instead of the GA reliever, as we had to meet the new TC examiner after his flight down from Edmonton. It turns out we had a stroke of (poor) luck; the new TC examiner was in fact the head of flight training for all of Western Canada (gulp)...pressure goes up again for both myself and the DFTE-in-training. We got through the oral exam and filed our flight plan, with everything still going well, fired up the aircraft and taxied out, where the runup revealed we had monumentally fouled up the spark plugs on the long taxi. This aircraft was notorious for fouling its plugs, and I had thought I had leaned the engine enough to prevent it, but it turns out I didn't. Anyway, it wasn't anything a brief, high-power engine run couldn't cure, so we were on our way. The initial part of the flight was going well, but after about 15 minutes, just as we were approaching the NDB we were going to a hold at, my foggles began to actually fog up. Whether it had to do with the aircraft being parked out in a torrential downpour the night before or just me sweating bullets is a point of debate, but I was rapidly losing my ability to see anything, never mind outside the aircraft. After the first turn of the hold, I had to hand control back to the examiner briefly to clean my foggles. Even though I thought ahead and had packed a cloth in my kneeboard (I wear glasses normally), all it did was smear around the moisture and make a mess, meaning I would have to complete the flight as if I was in some softly lit late-night Showtime soft-core porno. Surprisingly enough, I was able to overcome that impediment too and the flight continued to proceed rather well. We returned to Calgary to do a single-engine ILS and missed approach, then a non-precision approach to landing; the last two exercises of the flight. The single-engine approach went about as well as you could expect, as did the missed, but things started to fall apart again. I had expected to be vectored around to do an NDB approach to landing on the same runway we did the single-engine approach on, but ATC had other plans, and decided to land us on the cross runway. I should have noticed that the vectors they were giving us were not the normal headings to return to the same runway, but I didn't. Only when they gave us our gate leg to the cross runway did I realise that I was set up for the wrong runway! A very brief moment of panic ensued, then that little voice in my head said, "snap out of it, rear end in a top hat, you can fix this!", and that's just what I did. I got all the radios set up in record time and performed the world's most concise approach briefing, at which time the HSI was just coming alive on the desired radial for the VOR approach. The rest of the flight (all of a couple minutes) went without a hitch, thank God. All the while back to the FBO, I honestly thought I had failed the flight, with all the poo poo that happened. Fortunately I did not; the TC examiner said of my flight that it was "some of the best flying he's ever seen" - high praise indeed. Not only that, but my friend-turned-DFTE passed his evaluation as well. We broke for lunch (where we all enjoyed a tremendously good conversation), and we departed for the GA reliever where the flight school was based. That short little flight, all of 20 miles, went well until landing, where we ate a seagull on rollout. What a loving day. On the plus side, I feel that all the weird poo poo I put up with on these rides early on means that statistically I am probably immune to this stuff in the future; so far that has held true on all my subsequent renewal rides as they've been unremarkable to a tee.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:52
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 05:47 |
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My 61 examiner was in his mid-70s, but he was/is totally with it. So it was just rear end in a top hat-by-nature, I think. When I'd considered starting Commercial at the school, he was offered to "tag team" with my aforementioned CFII to be my (if you will) co-instructor. My text reply was as follows: "No." She seemed understanding as to where I was coming from (which was reassuring because, if need be, she'll give you an rear end-chewing if you've earned one), and I knew I could reject that proposal and not be looked at as a dick in my own right. But flying with him on a regular basis sounded like it'd be a soul-crushing experience akin to paid visits to the seventh layer of Hell. It worked out in the end, really, because it wasn't much longer after that while time-building that I saw how things were going in the regional world and scrapped the career pilot aspirations, opting for flying for fun instead. And, in the end, maybe shutting that path down reinvigorated the fun in flying; when I last flew in November 2012, the fun was gone, but once time and money allow, I can't wait to do a BFR and get back to it an hour or so at a time on my own terms. CBJSprague24 fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 02:36
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The head instructor at one of my instructing jobs was pretty much unbearable, and thankfully never got accepted for a DPE slot. Aside from being generally unpleasant to deal with (I was reminded that "liberalism is a mental illness" pretty much weekly), he would frequently come up with bizarre interpretations of regulations that he would then insist the other instructors needed to comply with. My personal favorite was when he became convinced that a first solo couldn't consist of touch and go's, because there's a FAR stating that students make three full stop landings at a towered airport (the relevant FAR only requires those landings to be done at some point in training before an applicant can take the checkride). That situation culminated in him yelling at me in front of a student about how I was a terrible instructor for not agreeing with that interpretation, which lead to the student walking out over the incident. Shortly before I left that job, I also got to spend three months arguing with him about whether an IFR certified GPS can provide distance information on a VOR or ILS approach when the approach is loaded from the GPS database. Despite the fact that the FAA approved manuals for the GPS, a representative from Garmin, and a couple of DPE's all said that loading the approach from a database was acceptable, he still insisted that a much more complex procedure that lead to significantly less situational awareness (and would be dangerous on some missed approach procedures) was the only correct way to use the GPS. On top of all this, he had been involved in totalling at least three airplanes on landing (one of which I actually witnessed), but because the damage never quite met the NTSB threshold of an accident, he kept instructing.
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Sep 20, 2014 05:53
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Well my first instrument lesson went well considering the essentially unairworthy turd we were in. My CFI and I both decided we are absolutely never renting that plane again. compass was all over the place once we were in the air one of the VORs was 10° off vsi was +100 on the ground no DME glideslope was inop com1 wouldn't xmit and to top it off it was a 150hp 172 in Colorado
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Sep 20, 2014 16:07
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Butt Reactor posted:Finally got my commercial multi (add-on) last tuesday, one step closer to getting out of instructing...AWSEFT, update the OP if you don't mind Done. Sorry for the delay.
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Sep 20, 2014 16:10
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AWSEFT posted:Done. Sorry for the delay. Can you update my name and location in the OP? I was e.pie and I'm in Colorado. 
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Sep 20, 2014 16:18
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e.pilot posted:no DME Here's another flight school story. I'd flown at my pilot mill's satellite campus in the Summer of 05 to knock out as much Private as I could before doing my Senior year of high school. When I came back as a full-time student to do Instrument, the original batch of instructors had transitioned to the airlines, with a new pack coming in to take their place. Whereas the first group made the school run like a well-oiled machine and a fun place to be to boot, the second pack...not so much. After falling on the sword for my instructor (the third I'd had there because the first transitioned to MEI work only at the end of Summer 05 and my second became Base Manager in early 06), who had timed out the day before and doing one of his lessons the next morning would've taken him over 8 hours, we went up on another lesson, the point of which being to practice DME Arcs. I showed up at 2:30 for a 3:00PM wheels up and a 3:00-5:00 block, with it laid out that I wanted to be to the college campus at 5:30 for a meeting. The plane came back late because of another instructor. The plane needed fueled. The fuelers didn't show up. At 4:45, my instructor tells me to go clean up our 172 and preflight the other (we had two). So I did, and we were wheels up right around 5. We head to the VOR and he gives me instructions for an Arc, so I tune the VOR and plug the frequency in the DME rea--"boy, that's hard to read. Let me cycle it and see if maybe it's just goofy.", I thought to myself. The next quote pissed me right off: "Aw, poo poo. This is the 172 that the DME doesn't work right in.". We did some BAI stuff on the way back to the airport, at which point I muttered "Well, we got something done today.". So not only is there something goofy, but the instructor (who was called out for ripping another student during a lesson WHILE SAID STUDENT WAS BACKSEATING) know, and gently caress all has been done to remedy the problem. And I'm paying premium prices to fly here. I think I did one more PCATD lesson with them. But, wait! There's more! I went to my advisor at the college and explained that these late 1970s/early 1980s one-sevener-twos might not be sufficient for what I and the other 6-7 Instrument students were doing at the time. She said "Yeah, that's messed up" and scheduled a meeting between she, myself, and the Director of the Aviation program, who had recruited me in early 2005. A proud SOB, he blasted me a new one, informing me the school had won Diamond Awards for maintenance, DMEs weren't required on the MEL for flight training, and that I was the problem, even though one instructor the summer before had complained out loud that the shoulder harnesses in the same plane "SUCKED" and the 152s we'd used for Private had burned out instrument lights. "Maybe you're not mature enough for the program; let's consider the A&P or Dispatch programs", despite him thinking I was impressive as poo poo the year before. I had the original base manager's number and called him, because he'd always been a fair guy who was willing to help people out; now in an administrative position with the school, he agreed "Yeah, that's messed up", refunded the cost of the lesson, and said he'd look into what was up. I took some time off from flying to figure out what my next step was while working on my Associate's. In the meantime, the other Instrument students were sitting ducks for about a month the next March because both 172s had broken and there was nobody to fix them. The next Summer, I'd considered going back to Pilot Mill with one of my friends as my instructor. At about that point, the rumblings through group Facebook PMs began. And they were vaguely corroborated by a newly-hired CFI who was a local college alum. The phrase "Class Action" came up. And on 9/11/07, the same Director called a student meeting to inform us that Pilot Mill USA was pulling out thanks to an escape clause in their contract with the college. A few minutes later, following a pitch about a local school being tabbed as the replacement and buying Diamonds (which never happened), the newest base manager indirectly redeemed me by saying, out loud, to the crowd and in front of the Director: "It'll be nice to have planes that work for a change, eh?" I finished my Associate's that Fall Quarter and was invited in for an exit interview before transitioning to ERAU-WW. The Director was excited to see me, because apparently very few people actually did the interview. I was asked about the positives of the program (and, Pilot Mill aside, I'd recommend the program to anybody because it was and still is a good program). In the same office where I'd been chewed out a year before, I was asked what my least favorite part of the program was. Without burning my bridges, I couldn't help but utter "Well, you knew what my problem was...". The Roger Goodell "Yeah, I blew it, didn't I?" look was incredible. I think we left it at that. CBJSprague24 fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 16:45
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e.pilot posted:Can you update my name and location in the OP? Done.
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Sep 20, 2014 17:43
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Just finished my primary flight training instrument cross-country. All that texting and driving I've been doing for the past decade is finally paying off, it went well. Can you add me to the OP? I'm a PPL SEL-High Perf-Tailwheel holder currently in Navy flight training at Whiting (as a Marine). About to finish up here in the next few weeks and select a pipeline.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:08
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overdesigned posted:Just finished my primary flight training instrument cross-country. All that texting and driving I've been doing for the past decade is finally paying off, it went well. Wait until you go back to text and drive after flying.
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Sep 22, 2014 03:19
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I've caught myself trying to unconsciously rudder-trim my car back to coordinated driving on the way home after a long day. I think I have problems. Also I should probably get my car's alignment checked.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:51
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overdesigned posted:I've caught myself trying to unconsciously rudder-trim my car back to coordinated driving on the way home after a long day. I think I have problems. On several occasions leaving the airport after a flight, I was afraid of bouncing the prop off the ground in a dip leaving the parking lot. I finally got over it.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:08
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I'm working on a new thread. Almost 100 pages here and lots has changed with 117 and 121 minimums. Also reworking the pilot list and removing anyone who hasn't posted to SA in over a year. Still need a name. Was thinking "It's a pay shortage, not a pilot shortage" and linking to the article about how the airlines have had YEARS and chose to do nothing.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:14
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AWSEFT posted:I'm working on a new thread. Almost 100 pages here and lots has changed with 117 and 121 minimums. Also reworking the pilot list and removing anyone who hasn't posted to SA in over a year. Safety: Powered by top ramen.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:15
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Safety: Sponsored by Starbucks(tm)
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Sep 22, 2014 18:18
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"Competent Labor, Incompetent Regulators" ...or Incompetent Everything Else. I don't know if anyone else in here watches Squidbillies, but apparently the actor who voices Rusty Cuyler is a regional pilot.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:25
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 05:47 |
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Overpaid bus drivers.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:48
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