I have wondered about a few of the same things tom. I have only been flying for 5 years, which includes flight training and instructing.

When I first started training at my school, there were a fair amount of students and all of which were domestic. Another bigger flight school on the field also had a good amount of students, most of which were domestic. It was very busy.

As I went through training though, I noticed that traffic started to lessen. During the slow down, the instructors at my school (all of which were domestic and came from the bigger school on the field), started leaving for the regionals. My school at the time didn't need to hire very many people to replace the ones leaving because of the lesser volume of new students. There were rumors that the same thing was happening at the bigger school and that it was going to have to stop ops for a while due to there not being any new students. However, there was a third school on the field that never really seemed to slow down and in fact picked up. It was an international flight school.

As of today things have picked back up substantially! The bigger school now has mostly foreign students from China (like 95%) and the international flight school, which is were I now work is hustling to find instructors to meet the growth of our booming 100% foreign base. I might add that the school that I work for now is looking to retain foreign students that complete the program to stay on and instruct. However, the place were I did my training does not have any foreign students that I know of and they don't fly anywhere close to the amount of time that the other two schools on the field do.

So I say all this because I think that there may....may be a larger number of foreign students here that are career oriented than domestic. We have another school on the field that is part 61 and they seem to do okay but from what I've been told most of there students are people that just want to learn to fly for fun.

I think the job market for instructors is great right now.