No flaming here. All of my CFIs have spent some time teaching this to me, all the way back to the first who covered the panel with his jacket and told me to fly the damned plane.
The difficulties you'll run into (or maybe I should say that I'll run into if I ever get this CFI quest finished up) is that to raise the minimum standards for the initial pilot certificate would make something that's already hideously expensive for the average American loaded down with tens of thousands in consumer debt and hundreds of thousands, often pushing half a million, in housing debt -- would make the initial Private certificate something only a handful can even hope to fiscally accomplish.
Or so they think, anyway. (Obviously some of us figure out that debt is flat out slavery and decide to hammer the "beans and rice" diet and/or go figure out how to make a LOT more money in our careers to pay for this crazy freakin hobby... It can be done... Everyone here is proof...)
It probably also doesn't help that many older pilots started off in CHEAP to fly taildraggers with no radios and no fancy gadgets and not a thing useful in the panel to fixate on, and learned to really fly the things including listening and feeling stuff with their butt, and there are scant few opportunities to do this anymore. We can all joke about the amazing Cessna "Land O Matic" gear and their marketing of the past, but honestly, it worked. And now nosedragger pilots like myself have to work our butts off to connect our feet to our brains. Landing work in a taildragger or glider really helps get that feel for low speed ops and the sloppiness of the controls hammered into long term memory so when it happens unexpectedly, the recovery is instant and automatic.
Example: Ted's airspeed indicator thread. Stuff felt "wrong". He knew from experience the aircraft was acting like it was too slow.
I want more tailwheel time. I also want the glider ratings. It's definitely in my future lists after these CFI ratings as "important" to me. My tailwheel and glider time in my logbook is scarce and incomplete and even with only a little I see the value in both.
Energy management is where it's at! Gotta do it. Gotta know it in your ears and your butt. It has to be there or a stall horn is going to wake you up someday and hopefully you go straight to the proper recovery technique without even thinking about it. It's just got to be instant and automatic.
And that takes time. And money. And it's hard to demand more of that from folks barely able to pay for lessons. Just a really hard Catch-22.
They go out of their way to have their students do their 3 solo landings at the sleepiest towered airport in a 150 mile radius.
