Level Flight
While the initial standard may be lower, you should perform all maneuvers toward a student goal of 5-5-50. This means within five degrees of heading, five knots of airspeed and fifty feet of altitude. Pilots 2-2-20

Level aircraft using wingtip and horizon then hold nose in position while trimming. Don't reduce power until you have reached level cruise speed. Let go of yoke and watch the nose. Any rise or fall of the nose is indicative of improper
trim setting. Position nose again and re-trim until nose holds level flight. Put hands up by windshield. Nose should go down. Place hands overhead behind you. Nose should go up. Only way to fly.

Put aircraft into 30 degree bank and trim nose-up half a turn. Let go yoke and use rudder to keep angle of bank. Aircraft should be able to maintain altitude and bank without your touching yoke. Left or right no difference. This ability is designed into the aircraft. Aircraft will attempt to level itself at less than 30- degrees of bank. Aircraft will attempt to roll on over at more than 30 degrees of bank. Knowing the how to use the inherent stability of the aircraft makes flying safer. Practice.

Work on 30 degree banks with 90 degree turns continuously alternating from left to right. Always clear when the wing is above the horizon. Lead recovery by 15 degrees and try to get bank reversals to occur on selected headings.

Work on leaning procedure every time you level off. It should be done at any level flight altitude. Make use of mixture as common as use of carburetor heat. Just don't get the two crossed up.

Make going to slow-flight a matter of time. Learn to have the aircraft transition from level cruise to hands-off slow-flight in a matter of seconds. Any such transition can be done in half the normal time you usually take with practice.
Time how long it takes you. Now, work to cut it in half. Works.

Apply flaps without looking at flap indicator. Use 3-4 count for every ten degrees of extension. Air loads speed up retraction so use different count. Practice milking up flaps on ground before doing so in the air.

At altitude, make opportunities to fly minimum controllable. The true test of flying skill is finding your own lower speed limits and knowing what it takes to maneuver when there.

Why Airplane Pilots Sit on the Left Side
Does not explain why students land on the left side. Students land on the left side
because they fail to add right rudder as they raise the nose in the round-out and flare. (Finally recognized in 2001 while flying a Beech Skipper.)

Behind many of the things we do in flying lies a long history. This often dates well before flying. Have you ever wondered why left patterns are standard? Before airplanes and cars, men rode horses. Most people are right handed. As a matter of good practice weapons were carried on the right side and kept available to the right hand.

Since it was always desirable to keep the right hand and weapon available, horses were mounted from the left side using the left hand for lift by pulling on the saddle horn. To keep the right hand free from attack on the narrow roads of England they rode on the left side of the track. This forced brigands to cross an open space. This also kept the right hand available for for attack or defense against oncoming travelers. I have not yet found the logic for why the Americans drive on the right side.

By happenstance, the military cavalry was the least dogmatic of the services in all countries. When the military adopted the airplane, the cavalry was the natural choice for pilot selection. The cavalry looked upon the airplane as another
mode of transportation like the horse. Best to be mounted from the left as by habit. Early cavalrymen nee' pilots were even required to wear spurs while flying. Did I really say the least dogmatic of the services?

You will need to search old film very hard to see an old time aircraft being mounted from the right by the pilot. I have never seen such. In fact, most passengers mounted from the left. When aircraft were designed for side by side seating, the pilot in command (captain) sat on the left. The preferred pattern direction was left because that gave the pilot better visibility. By convention the standard traffic pattern is now to the left.

Student and Instructor Samples
The nature of certainty
In my careers as a school teacher and flight instructor I have discerned some student classifications that appear universal. There are students who make things happen; there are students who watch things happen; and, there are students who wonder what happened.

Flying is not a good place for the last category student. To the extent that a student is not self-prepared or tutored into a lesson or maneuver it will be a constant state of wonderment. It is a fortunate student who has sufficient
awareness to recognize his state of wonderment as a requirement for a series of questions. The wondering student needs to study learn and question his way out of that wondering state. This can best be done by having comprehensive study materials and a question/answer forum such as recreation.aviation.student on the internet. Just studying for the test is NOT the way to go.

In some flight situation there is value in watching, but only if you are knowing what to watch. In making turns, you are watching the horizon and the nose relationship. In fact, most maneuvers require that you watch what is happening to the nose in relation to the horizon. The sooner these relationships are imprinted in your visual perception the better. Keeping it there is the next step of the watching process. The ingrained desire to 'see' below the nose must be overcome if the 'watching' student expects to benefit when he moves into the 'makes things happen' phase.

The best phase of learning and instruction in flying is the process of making things happen. This 'making' includes mistakes. The opportunity to make your own mistakes is of major importance. The opportunity to do something correctly is nice but the making of a mistake is a learning experience of unequaled value. Recognition of a mistake is part of the learning experience. A spiral descent is an example as is a wing drop during a stall. The process of making things happen either correctly or incorrectly is not totally up to the student. The instructor creates situations as learning experiences. Distractions for example. The instructor who allows a student to perpetuate an unsafe procedure is incompetent at least in that area.

There are teacher (instructors) who from even limited experience seem to be all-knowing about all things. There is considerably more to instructing than just being able to fly the plane through a particular maneuver. The 'watching'
student will partially benefit but the instructions must include where to look and for what. If this where to look and for what was not included in the pre-lesson overview then it occurs in the cockpit. The cockpit is a relatively poor place to provide instruction. The poorest examples of such instruction I have noted over the years is when the instructor accepts and perpetuates a student's perception of safety when it is less than the optimum. An example is when a recent private pilot flew me four miles from takeoff before reaching 1000'  AGL. She wanted to see where she was going. All turns were at 15 degree banks or less so she could see under the wing better. (C-150) We only made one flight. She went with an instructor who accepted her way of doing things. Not the first time for me nor
the last.

Poor instruction is perpetuated but so is good instruction. The normal tendency is for the instructor to teach the way he was taught. I once knew a flight instructor who perpetuated three 'generations' of flight instructors whose students consistently failed to flare to keep the nose wheel from making initial contact. Numerous collapsed nose struts and propeller strikes were the result of this one 'old-timer'. The students loved these instructors because they could always
see the runway on landing. The maintenance shops always recommended these instructors. The more the teacher (instructor) knows the less certain he is that there is only one 'correct' (profitable) solution for any performance.

Advice can be right, wrong, conditional, dangerous, incomplete, misleading, universal, or limited in scope and application. Giving dangerous advice, even with a disclaimer is quite hazardous when the recipient has no way to discriminate or associate the advice in a meaningful context. Giving wrong advice can lead to fatal results when associated with flying. If in the giving of advice, you must include a disclaimer of any sort, it is better to refrain or at least to pose it as a question.

As a teacher, I was not given to meaningless praise or reward. As a flight instructor, I judge the lesson by knowledge applied, improvement observed, and satisfaction achieved. The achievement of normal expectations is viewed as acceptable but not deserving of profuse adulation. Only when my retarded students did beyond the usual were they praised. Praise, thus achieved value by not being a throw-away for everyone. My gifted students were always faced
with ever higher expectations. My standards were once compared with an ever extending extension ladder. One of my many weaknesses as a flight instructor is an unwillingness to accept from a pilot or a student less than their highest level of performance. Close is accepted only when accompanied by significant improvement. It is a poor student that does not exceed his teacher.

Once read, that every advance by mankind has been achieved by laziness. I hate to see students preflighting inefficiently. I believe that flying correctly is the easiest way to fly. Every maneuver can be either easy or hard depending on how 'lazy' the pilot has been in knowing how to make it 'easy'. I cringe when a pilot works too hard at flying. Flying is easy only when it is efficient and I don't mean using an autopilot.

If you are a student who has a death-grip on the yoke, you are working too hard. You will fly better by learning to trim and let go. Most any airplane can be flown quite well without touching the yoke. Use the rudder. A well trimmed plane can be made to climb or descend slightly, just by nodding the head. try it. I used to call trim the power steering of flight. I was corrected in r.a.s. into calling it cruise control. Knowing what to do and when to do it allows the lightness on the controls that makes flying easy.  Even talking on the radio can be made easy. To talk effectively, you must know where you are or will be when you plan to talk. You will give your altitude as an additional warning to other aircraft. You will rehearse to eliminate unnecessary verbiage and eliminate pauses and punctuation. All the rest is 'canned', in the same informational sequence for every ATC situation. Additional information by the pilot beyond the minimum shows the extent to which the assertive pilot is in command. You must know enough to protect yourself from ATC mistakes.

Do you think that many people of this type of ability stick out the 'failing to achieve' that must come to them with flight training? That makes me wonder about your '250 feet per mile, ROC' student. First, I am worried that this girl could ever have been certified (to fly, that is!). Secondly, I wonder if there is not a method that you have found in your years teaching, to show people who think they are doing OK, that there is a better or safer way? Did this person present a rational argument for what she was doing? I assume if "seeing where she was going" was it, that SHOULDN'T be too difficult to talk her out of, on the ground, even!?!? Or would she just not accept information from you? that WOULD be a problem, for all pilots, not only you as the instructor.

Gene's response:
"Pupils don't fail, instructors do."

--As for poor instruction being perpetuated, I have seen the same thing happen.....to the point where I lost a friend, and he took a student with him while trying to perform an aerobatic show for his visiting parents. My question though, relates to the story of yours, and to the second "type 3" student I mentioned earlier. She was on her first solo cross-country, she got 'kinda' lost and upon her return to the field, (a 2000' strip) made a particularly bad landing and porpoised the nose-wheel into a "STAR". She quit flying that day. Do people not lose confidence, maybe to the point of quitting, when they continually screw something up? When people become more experienced, theirs skills more finely tuned....do they not understand from the A&P's bills, if nothing else that they are messing up?
or is this a type 3 that wouldn't realize?

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