Young
@knot4u was with his CFI, so that dulls the cut a bit. But in my inexperience of being an instructor, I'm not sure if a student pilot even with his instructor sitting tandem has the skills fly in those conditions. But Methuselah, I mean
@knot4u is older, they did flight training different then, they do it today. You used to learn spin training in PPL. In
today's one size fits all primary training world, I just I can't see this type of stuff happening as a student pilot. He survived to tell the tale. All's well that ends well. I guess my shock was that, that wouldn't probably happen in today's "big box" flight schools, with company written training lessons, that CFI's aren't allowed to deviate from. Strict six month accelerated training programs, And only being able to do x-countries to management/company approved airports.
I hate to be "that person" to say this, but I'm going to:
Flight training standards have slipped to a dangerous level. We're teaching people to follow recipes, to be line cooks, to prepare the exact meal the examiner wants. But that's not enough to be PIC—to be PIC, you need to be a chef. Often the aviation gods will give you filet mignon and asparagus au poivre, with everything in pre-packaged amounts, but sometimes you'll get cow intestines and chicken livers, and you'd better be able to make something edible.
This isn't "old and crusty" versus "new and smart," it's literally knowledge banking versus building a true, professional understanding of a subject.
My students
will learn to navigate using navlogs and dr. They
will learn VOR navigation. They
will learn to use proper pilotage. They
will receive more than just an "intro" to hood work, and if I can get them into IMC, even better. If I can take them up for spins, I absolutely do that, too.
The first time you encounter IMC shouldn't be as a new PPL flying on a moonless night, with the sudden sinking feeling that you've lost the ground lights.
Most of my FOs are good, but they don't know what they don't know. They're children of the magenta, for real. Children of the gouge. And the captains they often fly with, these days, are the same as they are. They put up a finger to silence me when I'm calling for a configuration change or checklist, if they decide they must answer ATC, they literally show up with kneeboards and "CRAFT" pads, they write down every radio call, to the point that they miss calls due to writing, rather than configuring the airplane appropriately, and so on. I'm wearing four different hats: CFI, mentor, crewmember and captain. And whereas the weight used to be "Crewmember, mentor, captain, cfi", it's now shifted to "Captain, CFI, mentor" with "crewmember" hanging on by the tail and occasionally making an appearance when I fly with the rare senior FO that hasn't been forced into the left seat.
The reason that things are shifting is that we're seeing the influence of senior captains (or even mid-seniority captains) start to fade away. Most of the captains these FOs fly with have 1100 hours of 121 time after being a CFI, and many of them didn't spend a ton of time flying with the super senior folks, so the inexperience is starting to compound. But it's not just the airlines—it's aviation as a whole. There aren't many new ways to kill yourself in this business, but if you're not prepared to handle all the normal banal ways that people kill themselves, you're set up for failure.
