Page 20 - Volume 20 Number 8

Doing The Job ofIt was a simple job. I was mowing a small meadow on our ranch, clipping away weeds to improve the stand of forage. All it required was putting the tractor in gear and turning left at the ever-diminishing corners. Like a lot of life’s chores, I could take time to do it well, or I could rush it through in a sloppy manner. The area was a half-mile away from any eyes, so no one but me would know if I left a few weeds standing or skipped a corner.Thus it is with teaching flying skills. When introducing new subjects of study, the instructor can teach them well or poorly, as he or she wishes. No one will know except the CFIs themselves, at least for now. It’s possible to cut corners in training, leaving some lessons untaught, to be filled in later by the student’s in-flight experiences.One of my students from 25 years ago came by to see me the other day. He lives half a continent away and is now flying pressurized twins, but he still remembers how he started out, and he told me we were the best instructors he ever had. That he has survived his career through unpredictable skies is evidence that he was started right.Beyond Bare-Bones TrainingIt’s easy enough to simply teach the test standards, and certainly the CFI has to go over these expected tasks to make sure the student is capable. But the standards are a bare-bones framework of things to be taught, nothing else. Life in the cockpit has so much more it can throw at a pilot. If we conduct all the training in a long winter of cool, stable air, the student may finish the course without ever knowing what summer turbulence and convective build-ups are like. And students who learn in a warm climate may have18 • TWIN & TURBINEnever seen an engine that has to be coaxed into starting. Theory is fine, but application is better. Ground school alone can’t substitute for real flight training.Starting Out RightAs I swung around the meadow’s perimeter on my initial cut, I took care to make the corners smooth, because each subsequent pass had to follow them. Thus it would be with a student’s first hours of initial training. What he learns from them will be the foundation upon which the rest of the curriculum will rest. Do it well, and your job as a teacher will be easier in the future. Make it sloppy, and it will require cover-up corrections later.I drove the mowing machinery in a left-hand pattern, just as regulations require at a standard non-towered airport, because the discharge sweeps a windrow to the left side of my cut. Each pass mulches the windrow into the previous cutting, leaving the meadow clear of weed piles that could kill new grass. In the same way, we incorporate what we learn in each previous period of training into new material introduced in today’s class. Rather than tossing it aside untouched, we put it to use, dispersing its lessons through our body of knowledge.The field looks so big when I begin, yet I know it will go faster after some of the longest rows are done. The task of learning how to bring an airplane into the air and safely back again also looks immense at the beginning. It has to be taken one period at a time, occasionally looking back to see how far we’ve come. Progress in training is seldom as regular and even as chopping down swaths of weeds, but neither can it happen without steady practice on a regular schedule.By LeRoy Cook I once had to abandon a pasture-mowing job because rain moved in, and I couldn’t get back to it because my travels took me out of the country. This allowed the weeds to pop back up. When I revisited the half-clipped field a month later, I had no choice but to start over. I have also had students drop away and come back after a year’s absence, and it was evident that we had to start over, from the very beginning. If the job is to look finished at the end, we have to make sure everything is covered to the same depth.Curiosity Is KeyThe important goal is flight training isn’t just to teach procedures and pass a check, but to inculcate into the student a desire to keep learning. It isn’t enough to finish a course by filling in boxes. If the student has healthy respect for the environment and machine, he’ll research a subject that is unfamiliar and find out if safety is affected by the challenge ahead. To want to learn is the way to live life productively, not just endure it.As with the job of mowing the meadow, I start students without worrying about how long it will take to get them done. Hopefully, I’ll make the burden of flight training seem light, and they’ll comment about how short the lessons seem. The best students want to keep on going past the scheduled time, staying perhaps another 15 or 30 minutes for questions and answers. More is not always better, of course. When fatigue sets in, it’s best to cap their enthusiasm with a break from strenuous study. Then we can start fresh next time.The uncut portion of the meadow shrinks as the sides of my rectangle become smaller with each round.AUGUST 2016T