Page 10 - Aug 19 TNT

Target Your Training by Thomas P. Turner Afriend of mine is a successful business owner who f lies a number of airplanes, including a single-pilot Cessna Citation. I ran into him at a recent NBAA event, and of course, the conversation focused on flying. At one point, he said, “Someone should tell the FAA that the workload in a single-pilot turbine aircraft is a lot higher than it is for two-pilot flight crews. ATC in the Dallas area has been giving me a lot of unpublished holds when the weather’s bad or the traffic load is high. It’s a lot of work to figure out a holding pattern, program it into the FMS and couple the autopilot when I’m doing everything else necessary to f ly the airplane.” My first thought was that I agree – con- trollers indeed should know the workload difference between a corporate or airline crew and a single-pilot operator. On re- f lection, however, I realized that setting up and entering an unpublished hold is a skill we all had to demonstrate in order to earn our instrument rating. Instead of a campaign to revise controller procedures, my friend’s statement was really a call for him to practice f lying unpublished holds in his next recurrent flight instruction. He had identified a deficiency in his current IFR skill set. This identification creates an opportunity for him to relearn those skills as they apply to a high-speed, tur- bine airplane – or to target his training to reviewing a specific task, customized for his needs. 8 • TWIN & TURBINE / August 2019 PHOTO COURTESY OF TRU