Can enough be said about the people who guide you through life? A mentor keeps you focused and helps show you the way. I’ve had a lot of them. Finding one can be a challenge, but it really shouldn’t be. We should just be able to show up at a flying school and pick one out and ask the questions to get the answers. But they aren’t always around, and it helps if someone takes the time to introduce you to one. I am speaking specifically about the ol’ school folk that are about an airport (pilots, mechanics, managers, etc.) who are out “there,” but not necessarily in the coffee shop at your local airport, if said “coffee shop” is even open these days! They are kind of a rustic bunch, often working on their own projects who are “go-to” people to find this or that. They’ve worked around airplanes for a long time and know a thing or two about the business of keeping them flying or how to fly them. In two words… ol’ timers.

I like seeking them out. They know a lot. My dad looked for them, too. In fact, when we rebuilt our first aircraft, one stepped forward, Joe Huspeka, and showed him how to splice a boxed spar on our Minicab’s wing according to the maintenance and standards manual. Exactly the way it’s shown in the book. When someone’s there, in person, to show you how to do it with a chisel and hammer, the book starts to make sense. It’s a welcomed bonus. See and do is the best way to learn. Trial and error can only get you so far when you’ve got a limited amount of material to work with and the work requires care. The same is true for becoming a pilot. How do I start? Where do I find an aircraft? What school should I sign up with? What are the different routes available? Military? College? On your own? There are a lot of daunting questions. A mentor can clear the haze.

I was fortunate enough to find such a person in the Air Cadets. His name was Capt. Robert “Bob” Mercer. He guided a group of cadets over several years to complete their scholarship exams to get to the top of the candidate pile for those precious few who were chosen for the glider and power courses in our squadron. Even the ones who didn’t get the scholarships then went on later, on their own, to complete the licenses (they were also very inspired by him). All of the group study was conducted on a ping-pong table in his basement. Several of us were gathered around with maps strewn about everywhere using Douglas protractors to plot our cross-countries and map out our 1 in 60-nm marks to calculate drift angles and course corrections for the exams. We worked hard to select the right answers (or avoid the wrong answers), practicing multiple “guess” questions, randomly selected from previous years’ exams. We were a dedicated bunch, but Mr. Mercer was there to set us on a straight path.

My wife Sandrine was also fortunate in finding another retired pilot, Capt. Chris Brown, who quickly finished off her private license. Chris was a former Air Canada A320 pilot who started to teach again after his retirement, successfully re-becoming a Class 2 CFI at a local flying club. He confessed that it was a long journey to get “re-checked” after a career of flying. He was surprised he hung in there long enough to get back to where he once started out as a Class 2 instructor before joining Air Canada.

I also asked him what he believed he helped her with the most during her flight training. He said, “I think I gave her the confidence to just keep going when it seemed that the chips were down and that we were only halfway up the mountain.” That comes from experience. It also comes from working with a lot of people in your lifetime, especially in the confines of airplane cockpits. We were lucky to find Chris before he hung up his wings.

I use these stories as examples of what our training system could be if more people with experience were encouraged to return and lend a helping hand. The instructors that do stick around for a while either soon take off for the airlines, abandon it outright because the pay isn’t the best, or, if they hang in there, make a career out of it. Make it to a Class 1 instructor, and the pay does improve, somewhat. Overall, there is a shortage of all instructors right now. My flying friend in Oshawa has already been through three of them, and she’s two-plus years into her private license. That’s too long. Maybe Transport Canada could consider the idea of an incentive (monetary, exceptions, or otherwise) for retired pilots to get back into the fold, passing along their accumulated knowledge, not just for the pleasure of being a mentor, but moreover for the necessity of training better pilots. I don’t know exactly what this incentive could be; it is just a thought that somehow, they could officially be included in the curriculum at a formal level. Reducing the paperwork to get back to instructing is a good start.

EAA Sport Aviation columnist Steve Krog recently brought this point forward in his column, Classic Instructor (Sport Aviation, October 2023), where he said, “One possible way of doing so is to get professional pilots back into GA and share your judgment, experience, and knowledge.” That’s fine if you have the passion and desire to teach like some of us do but, as far as I know, there isn’t much of an incentive outside of that, within the system, to nudge along the pilots that can pass along that knowledge, to come back. I say this based on my own experience with the hurdles that the governments attach to the formality of instruction. The bottom line is that it’s over regulated. How is it after all of our years of flying we are expected to do the same amount of hours in a Cessna 150 as the ab-initio student pilot who just got their license? Does it make sense that low-time pilots teach new pilots how to fly? That’s always been the core of the debate — at least from the new student’s perspective walking into a school and asking the same question. Would we ask Lewis Hamilton or Max Verstappen to learn how to teach youngsters to drive cart cars only if we also specified, “Well, you’ll have to put in the time in those cars before you can instruct”?

Chris ultimately sums up our current training woes to the “breaking of the chain of experience” in our industry. He highlights this in his soon-to-be-published book Still Learning To Fly — A Pilot’s Life. For now, you can read about some of his other exploits in the industry at www.formercaptain.ca.

Transport Canada should come up with a pathways program allowing airline pilots to become instructors without doing the entire curriculum. As it is, airline pilots who make it to captain already teach first officers on a regular basis. They would be extremely proficient as instructors after 5-10 hours of flying with a Class I instructor and a refresher ground school course to learn the technicalities of briefing pilots for their flight exams.

On a final note, a pilot I was recently flying with stressed one obstacle to his return to general aviation. When he showed up at the local airport one day looking for a checkout on a Cessna 172, asking that he’d just like to fly “now and then” around the patch in his retirement, he was told, without any reflection by the 350-hour instructor, that with his 20,000-plus hours of experience, it might take 5-7 hours in the aircraft to complete! We are not talking about a high-performance airplane here. A simulated engine failure and a circuit or two should be enough to conduct any checkout in such an aircraft. For him, that could have been roughly $2,000-plus in rental and instruction. Rates have dramatically climbed since my student learning days. Gracefully, without making a fuss — while disappointed, he declined and called it a day. As another school owner pointed out to me, the instructor in question could have gone a prudent route and said, “Let’s go up for a circuit and see how it goes and then make the assessment after a short flight,” to see where the rental pilot is and how they feel with the aircraft. After all, even some long-time airline pilots have been known to have a difficult time with the smaller ones; although it could have paid off even more handsomely to have an experienced pilot around at the airport in the future, if only to encourage the new ones to “hang in there.” In other words, we could start off on the right foot by at least giving some credit where credit is due. If we want to encourage experienced pilots to return, let’s not slap them in the face with a big juicy bill and instead recognize what their presence around the airport could ultimately mean to everyone’s success.

John Wyman, EAA 462533, Chapter 266 Montreal, is a passionate aviator. When he isn’t in the saddle at the airline, he can be found out at the airfield doing any number of things. He likes to fly gliders, practice aerobatics, work on airplanes, and fix stuff.