Page 21 - Dear aviator...

(provided the pieces are assembled in the correct order). If, however, you are using
pieces from two separate sets - even if they are puzzles of the same image - those
pieces might not fit with the same ease and the finished product might appear
jagged and incomplete and the experience itself may be unpleasant for the puzzle
enthusiast. Now imagine if a 100-piece puzzle came from 20 separate sets and you
get an idea of the potential for an unnatural, inefficient and unpleasant puzzle-
solving experience.
Instructor notes help to a degree but I remember several moments where I had the
impression that my training was progressing more slowly than expected due to
misunderstandings with different instructors.
The ability to “read” and “understand” a student is also one that comes with
experience, so I don’t feel I can fault the younger instructors for this - as an aside I
would like to acknowledge that, with only one or two exceptions, all my instructors
were very well prepared. What I DO fault the school for, on the other hand, is the
fact that ALL the instructors, especially the ones employed for the early phases of
training, were very young, in their early twenties. I often had the impression that
the instructors themselves did not have anyone they could look up to to ask
questions and get some mentoring. This was somewhat mitigated in the later parts
of training when I could clearly see a hierarchy of instructors and a handful of
mature and more experienced ones.
Whereas I could clearly see that most instructors knew their stuff (unsurprising, as
some of them had sat their instructor rating exam just a few months prior) it was
equally clear that some of them were for the most part uninterested with
instructing. It is a well-known fact that, after earning a CPL, instructing is the
quickest way to build up hours in order to be employable with the airlines. It is also
well-known that the mantra is “there is no worse instructor than the one who
doesn’t care about instructing”. And here is where I draw a very deep line between
instructing and teaching. Instructing is the technical aspect of transmitting
knowledge, the one described by all those charts and lists and connected to fancy
names of psychologists. Necessary yes, but hardly sufficient. Teaching comes about
when you couple this technical (and somewhat aseptic) aspect with the more
humanities-based ability to empathise with the topic taught and with the student;
to actually care for what you are teaching and wanting the student to not only
know the topic, but to understand it and be excited by it and be proud of
themselves for having grasped it.

Both of these aspects - the staggering number of teachers and the lack of
enthusiasm for their job - characterised what should be the first, and therefore
most important, milestone for a fledgling pilot: my first solo.

By the time I was ready to go on my first solo I had accrued about 17 hours and 6
different instructors. A solo flight is usually preceded by a solo-check, a short flight
during which the instructor makes sure the student is ready for what could
possibly be the most important flight of their career, the first time they are Pilot in
Command, responsible for all moments of the flight, from start-up to taxi, from
take-off to landing. It is relatively simple to see how this would be an important and

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