How do these guys get their ratings?

[Engine]

...I'm sitting in a classroom at a aviation college whose name will not be mentioned and overhearing commercial pilots talking about accelerated stalls. I hear them say their instructor put the airplane into 60 degrees bank and showed them an accelerated stall. They describe how terrified they are and that they never want to do that again...that an accelerated stall should be no more than 45 degrees. That they couldn't handle the g loads there. That they never want to fly with this guy again. One guy even says they were pulling 5 g's.

If you can imagine I am making the following faces:

I once flew with a very experienced guy who was an instructor with several thousand hours. I had my reservations about his skill but thought he was an instructor and would at least be good enough to fly. We're taxiing out about to depart IFR in hard IMC with the clouds at 500 solid through 5000. I am trying to be as thorough as possible when getting the plan ready and taxiing out. This guy is in a hurry. We start up and I notice the DC ELEC TC has the red flag on. I mention it to him. He responds it looks fine to me. I ask him what does he mean? He says it's always like that. I tell him there is no way. The load meter are ok at this point. We taxi out. The TC is functioning. We get to the runup area where I insist we do a thorough runup and triple check everything. Turns out that the load meter is showing 0. He keeps trying to "fix it" from inside the plan by taping the gauge and doing several engine runs. I decide I don't want to go. We get back to find out that there is no alternator belt anymore.

I'm convinced this guy would have gone flying into solid IMC if I weren't in that airplane.

Sometimes I meet people and have the misfortune of flying with them and ask myself how are these people qualified and how are they still alive!?

I'm sure you folks have horror stories of pilots you've met that are just undeserving of the title. Or perhaps this is me just ranting alone. Please share.

 

[noobJohn]

Complacency? I keep reminding myself to be thorough on all the preflight inspections, engine run up checks, etc.....

I drive some older vehicles and you build up a certain level of faith and trust in the machine based on all the times it's gotten you to your destination safely in the past. I think that's ok with a car but you should always be skeptical and more critical when inspecting and monitoring an airplane. A charging issue in a car is usually no big deal. A charging issue in IMC is a different story.

I could see a very experienced pilot becoming complacent. That's my explanation for what you observed. Perhaps some very experienced pilots will chime in with their own thoughts.

 

[stratobee]

Well, those guys are not gonna like their Bi-Annual reviews very much then from now on. Accelerated stalls are a new emphasis item.

As a side note. Sometimes with old airplanes (and old cars) they develop idiosyncrasies that only someone who've flown them a lot know about. My old Commander had a few of those. One of them was the oil temp on the left engine. After very long flights at high altitude, they needle started twitching and would frequently short out and peg full red. If you didn't know this, and hadn't caught the twitchings, you'd think something bad was up. If you pulled that engine back to idle for a little and cooled it down, the problem got better, but would eventually return again. Only way to stop it was to shut it down and let engine cool, then fly legs less than 4hrs and at low altitudes.