Yeh, Terry I agree with what you are saying...except for the flight instructor thing.

One of the drawbacks to teaching in the mindset that is required to pass and hold an instructor rating is you are handcuffed by the vision that the FAA has as to how to instruct, whereas if one does type rating training or training such as sea plane ratings the best teachers all things considered should be those who have tens of thousands of hours of the type of flying they are teaching.

I just quit one of the most interesting kinds of flying in aviation I operated a business that specialized in Warbird restoration and ferrying of these airplanes all over the world. I have several partners and we also do flying for the movie industry and for the past ten years or so I flew as an airdisplay pilot in the air show circuit all over Europe. It was the airshow flying that finally made me decide to quit because of all the B.S. that we had to go through just to hold our authorizations to fly in them.

However the movie business was great, we did some you may have seen such as "Band of Brothers"... " Tomorrow never dies" a James bond flick.... " Below " a Merimax film about a submarine in WW2 plus several more.

I'll try and link a picture of one of the band of Brothers DC3's that I flew.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e353/ChuckEllsworth/P1010045.jpg

I needed a haircut in that picture.

Anyhow back to tailwheel flying, I have a very simple method of teaching tail wheel stuff and I use a camcorder as a teaching tool, during the debrief I use the video to show the student where they are having problems when they screw up things like landings..I just stop the video and ask them where they were looking at that moment in time and what they were thinking...I find that using the video cuts the learning time in about half as far as grasping the picture of what they should be seeing goes.

Unfortunately it doesen't work worth a damn in a Pitts because you can't see straight ahead in the thing anyhow.

By the way I did some flying for a lodge at Tickchick narrows in a PBY in 1982, we were based in Anchorage.

Here is an interesting take off that I did in Rotterdam last summer for Dutch TV.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e353/ChuckEllsworth/RotterdamBridge.jpg

I hope you don't mind me posting this stuff in this forum as I am aware it should be about Cessnas but what the hell the pictures are of airplanes.

Chuck E.