Originally Posted by
RiddleEagle18
My point isnt to attack these guys its too attack the process and if your one of the guys you should kinda be ****ed about it too, you lost a year of seniority. The only reason we do this is $$$.
The process is flawed. Its not that these guys arent good instructors, its that there is a new and renewed perspective from having instructors who have flown the line and do more than 2 MCO-NAS turns a months. That cant be denied.
As a general rule, the best training house experiences I've had at JB were the adjunct guys, line pilots, who were only in the training department for a few months at a time.
I'm an instructor, but I was hired as a line pilot and brought in full time after I had a year of line experience. The adjunct guys are good, no doubt, but they suffer from the same problem but in the opposite way. They don't instruct enough to stay proficient with the courseware.
Personally, I go out and fly pairings in JFK and BOS on my fly days. NAS turns are boring. My fly days are the days I look forward to the most. In April I flew 2 trips instead of the required 4 legs in 2 days. I wish we could fly even more, but the training load is pretty heavy. A good solution would be removing the monthly requirement to fly and letting us bid every third month to fly. But there are downsides to that too for line guys. (Instructors bumping you down lower in their bid months, etc.)
What some guys don't seem to realize is that the instructing job and the line pilot job are not the same job. They are very different, and being a good line pilot doesn't necessarily make you a good instructor, and vice versa. So I don't buy this while "scope" argument about guys wanting to stay home in Orlando, but being thwarted by the non seniority guys. First, they DO hire full time line guys occasionally. And second it's not like being line qualified means you're automatically qualified to be an instructor.
The best way, hands down, to become an instructor is to get hired as a pilot first then apply for a full time instructor position after a year or two. Full time positions don't open up very frequently though.