While a flight school is required to retain records on students, only 141 schools need to retain records on instructors (aircraft checkouts and annual currency stuff).

PRIA does not apply to a school at which you were a student only, but if you subsequently worked there also who knows, maybe your student records would get forwarded also. Actually the school I worked at did exactly that, cuz we didn't fully understand PRIA.

141 flight schools are different beasts than 61 training. Bottom line, if it was a "flying job", submit the PRIA paperwork and let them sort it out.

Again, even though you are required to obtain a commerical pilot certificate to get an airplane flight instructor certificate, flight instruction itself does not require exercising the commercial priveleges and is not considered "commercial flying" as it relates to the hour limitations of part 121 and 135.

Not in any way trying to start a ****ing contest, but according to TSA and I would assume the STL FSDO, it does. At least that's what they told us and we just smiled and nodded. They wanted to have current numbers for scheduling on day one and I obliged.

Doesn't really matter. Assuming you were flying 150 hours per month as an instructor you still wouldn't hit 1000 by the time you're in class for two months plus, IOE and a reserve line.

Like I said, call Kathy. She knows this stuff, I'm just speculating.

STL FSDO is one of "those" FSDOs that takes their own view on the regs. There are plenty of horror stories from some local flight schools and 135 operators as well.

Ok, after some additional research, I may be wrong. I thought we had discussed this before, but the articles I found suggest otherwise. They are old though (circa 1997) so I don't know it has been superseded. I doubt with today's schedules anyone would want to instruct for cash on their free time anyway.

Dude, I know. I've trained, instructed and am now playing airline pilot under their watchful eye. The inspectors I've dealt with have been nice guys but they seem to play by rules that differ greatly from other parts of the country. They say there's a reason that the regs are so vague...

Couldn't agree more. The last thing I'm going to want to do after a 4 day is go bomb around in a 172 with somebody scaring the crap out of me.