Old 10-15-2008, 05:28 PM
  #10  
flyandive
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Joined APC: Apr 2007
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Originally Posted by Droog View Post
I would probably prefer to hire a sharp high school kid over a 30 year old. Most of the older folks who I saw get hired struggled through most of their careers, especially at the busier facilities. I like to tell people that the ideal applicant for a controller job would be a young kid who gets a lot of speeding tickets but doesn't get into accidents! So I fit the profile then? On the other hand, it's a fact of life that our skills deteriorate when we get older. The age 56 rule (just like the age 60/65 rule for pilots) exists because too many folks are in denial.

As far as the original topic is concerned, I never really agreed with the practice of combining the positions in order to bury the trainee. This usually just destroys the confidence of the trainee, creates a safety hazard and delays, and wastes everyone's time. From the CFI perspective absolutely, and in our case the student was also the customer, so you had to create the perfect balance of creating challenge and building confidence. You wanted them to succeed but it was imperative for them to make mistakes now rather than later. I would rather see the trainee master the basics, so that they would know their limits and have something to fall back on when the chips were down.
Oh, I would have loved to have gotten to train someone like VH. Although, I think I would have been too distracted be her... uh, intellect to have done a good job! Hope she is doing well, I can never recognize which one is her voice when I fly in there. What about you? Driving your family crazy yet?
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