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Certain Students Start Wrong
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 teachers (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?

Gene’s response:
Another instructor problem.
You also mention the exchange of advice/ information, particularly in a forum such as rec. aviation. student. I have made several posts in the group (not many as my time is very limited) in response to questions/ comments posed by others. On one occasion, it turned out that I had given information that had actually been superceeded. Now, I always give the best advice I can, if that is what is asked for. I say that it is 'advice' or 'my opinion' as in the recent debate I had with several people from the group on the subject of ‘prop-stopped’ forced landings to the ground. I still believe that this practice holds far too much "unnecessary risk" and would never teach that to a student pilot. That is not to say that, with the circumstances the other person gave, I would not try it, but I have never felt the need or had the will to try it, as yet. If I give 'information' as was the case I mentioned earlier, then I say that's what it is and include no disclaimer. My question here would be, is it not better that I posted a response to be corrected by somebody with more recent information, than to ignore the subject? If I had not posted, *I* would not know any better,

Gene’s response:
Would not a personal response rather than a posting avoid the problem?

I am not a student pilot, but will always be a student. I learned something, too! That brings me quite neatly to the one thing you said that I must disagree with. "It is a poor student that does not exceed his teacher." I have an 'old' friend who is the most experienced all-round pilot I have ever met (or even heard about), and I used to enjoy sitting around 'hangar flying' during my CFI prep. One of the things we agreed on was that the day you fly and do not learn something about flying, you should quit. In short, the same applies, the day I learn nothing will be the day I die. That is why I have to say, Gene, I think more appropriately, I believe it would be a poor instructor that allows his student to surpass, or exceed him.

Gene’s response:
The comment is a tongue-in-cheek statement with enough truth in it to defend. The highest level of learning is to benefit from the mistakes of those who have gone before. The increased safety of flying is a statement to the fact that today’s studdents and pilots are better.

I agree whole-heartedly with your views on praise and over-praising. The extending ladder is a nice way to look at it! Unfortunately, I think that one of my own major faults is laziness. I agree that doing things 'right' is the easiest way, but I personally, find myself doing only what needs to be done to achieve a particular standard as opposed to doing everything to my best ability, all the time. This particularly aggravates me about myself, yet I still do not change, I think out of laziness????

Gene’s response:
Old age is still another excuse for laziness.
To add to your last paragraph about 'Ease of doing right', for example, talking on the radio. Obviously one must know what to say and when to say it, this we can teach. What we cannot teach, unfortunately, is the confidence one gains from 'getting it right'. In my experience, this confidence has helped me improve in other areas even more than continual input from another would have. What does this mean????? ;0)

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