Well, I guess it''s my turn to kick in Two Cents worth (that''s one cent US).
After six years instructing (over 3000 hrs.in the air and about 5000 on the ground), I feel that I have an opinion.
My experience has been that I have instructed students at the Recreational, Private, Commercial and Flight Instructor levels. These students have come to me at the beginning of their training and from other instructors and schools. I can''t say that the number of hours that a student has during his training has much to do with the number of hours his instructor had, because I have Commercial students who received their Private training from instructor with twice the hours I have and I have found that they are amazed at how much they still had to learn once they started flying with me. Nearly all of the students I have worked with have plans to fly Commercially and I feel that it is my duty to teach them more than the minimum required to pass a test.
As any flight instructor would do, I am, from time to time, asked to do currency checks with customers, or upgrades to more advanced aircraft. These customers range in experience from 100 hours to 7000 hours. I have found that the number of hours these folks have cannot be taken as a given when trying to predict how they will perform on the flight. Where then is the relationship drawn that a low time instructor will not be able to teach as well as a high time instructor.
When choosing a flight school with low time Class 4 instructors it may be a good idea to ask about the supervision arrangements for the instructors. Who, how frequent, etc.
For the record, I had 49 hours when I got my private licence in 1974, and that included about 6 hours of just leasurely flying out over a lake where my family had property (not practicing any particular skill). At that time all hours leading up to your licence were Tax deductable so the extra hours were cheaper then than they would have been after I got my licence. You might say that I would have done it in 43 hours. Still more than the minimum required at that time, but my very low time instructor taught me things back then that some of my Class 4 students still can''t get through their heads (well lets say that they are starting to).
I do strongly believe that back then students were not as distracted and therefore learned more and better. There was also less included in the Transport Canada requirements (start with 5 hours of basic instrument training and a check list requirement that adds about .1 or more to every flight [we used to do it all from memory]). If you are keeping score, so far that would add 10 hours or more to the basic course without even considering the students'' attention span.
Quality in instruction is not measured in quantity, it is measured in content. Many instructors today were trained from the beginning by instructors who were trainned by instructors who didn''t know what they were doing. Some of the students I have had to "train" did their Private and Commercial training with an instructor who was more concerned with the 45 hours than the content of the course.
Charles (hello), why does a commercial pilot who was trained by a Class 1, 5000 hour instructor not understand attitude flying, and only flares because he knows that any later and it''s going to bounce hard. One might assume that the instructor knows how to judge the flare (maybe). It''s scary to think that this Class 1 is also "training" instructors.
A local school boasts that they are one of the top ranked schools in Canada. This is based on the fact that their students have higher average marks than the rest. The CFI is the DFTE, and most of the students have from 45 to 55 hours at flight test time. I have trained several of their graduates on basic attitude flying during their commercial course.
Our school does not boast about the high marks our students "achieve", we boast about the quality of their training. Our DFTE is our CFI as well, but he is not very lenient with the marks (fact is our students show below national average on the marking scale, but not on the ability scale). One of my students recently was tested by an outside DFTE and came up with well above national average marks.
The sum of all this rambling is that the number of hours at flight test time does not, in my opinion have much to do with the number of hours the instructor has, but in fact, has a lot to do with the quality of instruction that went into the instructors training and his/her dedication to producing a good product.
Cheers
