Originally Posted by
phalanxo
I don't understand how you could only have 280 XC at 1500 hours CFIing. Did you have mostly private pilot students? If you're doing any instrument training at all, it's not tough to get XC hours... and you were from DVT right? never went to P08?
I did most of my training and my first 500 hours of instructing out of a Class C airport in the midwest. We could do 7 different approaches and a few holds without ever going more than 10 miles from the airport and that's usually how we did things in order to save time and money. Commercial cross countries and time building were almost all solo so I had no way to log time on those. I had 700TT and about 100XC or maybe a bit less when I moved to PHX.
I got down to P08 as much as possible by volunteering for cross countries but I had a lot of instrument students and during instrument training it was kind of a waste of time. There's no sense in making a Chinese guy fly 40 miles out of the way to do a VOR approach to P08 that he'll never do on a checkride. TransPac was really about training students to pass a checkride, not training them to fly a variety of approaches. Sad but true.
Had I stayed in the midwest as an instructor I probably would have had about 100 XC when I hit 1500TT. PHX is what helped me build the XC.