New CFI

8/26/2006

I had decided to change CFI's. Why? That's a question I keep asking myself, because all I knew was that I simply 'wanted' a change of scenery.

Bruce has been a good teacher, he has a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that can only come from a pilot who has been flying since 1947. Yup, that's right 1947, the guy is 79 years old and is not just still flying, but is still teaching. Nice.

So why the move? Well this is what I came up with...

- he still kept saying 'keep 75!' when on climb-out when the needle is hovering between 73 - 77.lolol [kind of a joke, but still, it was irritating]

- the new location have a Piper Archer. I am a big guy, and the C150 I was training in was at its limits with me and a CFI in it [room, no full tanks on a cross country].

- Bruce was great at teaching the rudiments of flying, but I think his failing [don't we all have them] was that he had no structure for his lessons. I never knew what I was going to be doing in the next lesson. I would show up, he'd take a quick peek at my log book, and announce it. I knew structure was lacking because no goals were ever set and there was hardly ever no revisits to earlier training like turns around a point etc. On my solo days he never mentioned any tasks I needed to do, nor ever asked what I did. I would try to create my own. When I got to 27 hours, I suddenly realized I'd never done steep turns! When I told him, he couldnt believe we hadn't and scoured my log book for entries.

I felt it was time to get some exposure to a different CFI, not a better one, just different. So I decided to go to someone completely opposite from Bruce. This new guy, Tracy, is a new CFI. Infact he has still to put a student through a check ride. He is unashamedly a career pilot, but says he really enjoys teaching. My reasoning for choosing Tracy was that I knew that him having recently passed the CFI checkride would mean he was sharp, fresh, keen, and hopefully ran a structured plan for lessons with procedures oozing from him. This hope has infact materialized. On our intro flight, he said he was impressed with my flying and cockpit multi-tasking and that 'I'd been taught well'. Thanks Bruce.

I still feel twinges of guilt by moving on, but I am positive that having exposure to two very different teaching styles will enhance my flying.