I would agree with pretty much all of this some of the time. One thing that CFI-ing does get you is an intimate understanding of the regs and aerodynamics from an academic perspective - CFIs have also flown with a variety of people so they tend to understand how others deal with stress. What they don't have is a lot of "hands-on-yoke" time, a lot of landings from the left seat, or really much experience outside the CFI "bubble." Unless you're the CFI which takes all of their students up into the weather to build them experience, or goes on marginal days, you usually don't do a lot of that. Most of them don't spend a lot of time outside the pattern unless they're in the practice area.
I feel that my time out in the bush, followed by being an FO for 500hrs or so was substantially more valuable than what I would have gotten as a CFI. I flew the airplane, I was down in the weeds, I was shooting approaches, I was either learning on my own or being essentially mentored for the first 1000hrs until I went off on my own. I'd gladly do the same thing over again - though if I could redo it, I'd have gotten the CFI but never used it. I find a lot of guys who were CFIs to be afraid of the wrong things in their first job, and adamant about things that don't matter. A lot of them don't know the limits of their own experience. A lot of them can't turn off the instruction ethos when they should be learning themselves. I don't give a damn how you did it at your flight school, I want you to follow our procedures and practices. I've seen these sorts of guys do a super-duper preflight then miss the write-ups in the can and bitch when they got back about it. I've also seen these guys sweat every ounce of weight on a flight, then procede to take off without any nets up.
The real truth is that these guys are like any other low time, inexperienced guys. Low time and inexperienced. I mad equally stupid mistakes when I was in my first single pilot "PIC" job. Where the CFI has the advantage is in base knowledge, where the other guys have the advantage is in stick and rudder. In the end, early on, its a mostly a wash provided the pilot in question can pull his head out of his ass and be willing to learn. If he's unwilling to learn...well, then voila you have guys without CFIs and guys without stick and rudder time making asses of themselves all over the land.
Sorry for the long quote, but I tried snipping stuff and it just didn't flow in context. Bolding worked a bit better. So...
A good, competent and confident CFI should have a fair amount of "yoke" time. They should be DEMONSTRATING skills to students. They should be able to mimic what a student is doing wrong and then show how the correct way is different. Once you know the "right" way of doing something, it actually takes a lot of skill to do it "wrong" to show a student. A good CFI should be taking their student up in marginal weather, into a variety of airports and flight environments. A good CFI doesn't have a "bubble" because they are training their students for a certificate which will allow them to go out into the world and fly anywhere. Now, the reality is that that involves a lot of pattern work and a lot of maneuvers in the practice area on VFR days, but it shouldn't be limited to just that.
I understand that the reality is, in the current scheme of 141 schools (and even big name 61 flight academies) the pressure is on the CFI to get everything done in the shortest (read: cheapest) amount of time. That means there isn't always time to demo everything multiple times to a student. That means that there isn't always time to go on a long xc to a different sort of airspace/airport etc because instead the procedure is to go to the airport that is exactly 51 miles away, do a touch and go and come back. That's tough. And I agree that a guy that has ONLY instructed in (and I'm just using this as an example) the Riddle environment where they are crosswind restricted and ceiling restricted etc, probably hasn't had the opportunity to be a fully rounded, "good" CFI, through no fault of their own.
Point two... being down in the weeds shooting approaches etc etc... That is certainly a good skill set to have. However, speaking from the 121 side of things (and I don't have the experience to speak to much else), nobody cares about that. We (in general, as long as stuff isn't going terribly wrong) operate so far inside the safety envelope, that none of those things matter. Sure, we shoot approaches down to mins, but that shouldn't take any great set of skills to do. Any instrument student should be able to shoot an approach. Sure, we "fly the plane" (whatever that means) but who DOESN'T fly the plane? Yeah, sure we have autopilot so our hands might not cramp up as often as the guy blasting around in a 206, what's the difference? And what exactly does being down in the weeds mean? I don't even know.
What you learned doing all that is called judgment. It's an amazing skill set to have and one that will most likely keep you alive for the rest of your aviation career. Most CFIs learn judgement the same way. Do I let this student keep going with this landing or do I take the plane and go around? Do we continue out to the practice area to do stalls with that big nasty thunderstorm moving into the area? The dude before me flew the plane for 2 hours so can I go do my 2 hours with my student with out refueling? That's judgment. That's all it is.
In ADDITION to judgment, the CFI is also learning how to interact with a wide variety of people. They are learning CRM at it's most basic level. They are learning different more (and less) effective ways to communicate to people. They are re learning much of what they learned as a commercial student, but at a much deeper level because they have to be able to teach it to somebody else. They are learning how to get along with people and how to deal with people that there just isn't anyway of getting along with.
So, when the dude shows up for his first not entry level job, not only does he have judgment, but he also has really great interpersonal skills. To me, sitting in an RJ where I don't really give a damn about stick and rudder skills, because honestly, the yaw damper takes care of most of the rudder stuff anyway, I'd much rather have somebody sitting next to me who can make good judgments and has great interpersonal skills to explain those judgments to me.
And to be clear, I'm not knocking the guy that was out flying single pilot at night in all kinds of crappy weather. They've got GREAT judgment skills and they can fly an NDB approach like nobody's business (although I don't really care about that because we don't actually do NDB approaches) but if they can't also speak up and explain to me what I'm doing wrong, I don't feel they are very useful in a multi crew environment.
