Is the CFI Always Right?

Certificated flight instructors hate to be wrong. That's only human nature. Our job is to pass along information as accurately as possible, and even the sloppiest among us hates it when we make a mistake. What CFIs hate even worse than being wrong is to have a student know we are wrong, and then have that student slink off without pointing out our mistake. When that happens everyone suffers.

It's a fact of life that CFIs aren't always right and students aren't always wrong. It's also a fact that for a person to learn to fly - meaningful, productive communication between the CFI and the student must take place, and that includes having the student question the correctness of something the CFI has said or done.

The relationship between a flight instructor and a student is an interesting thing. Students come into aviation as relative newborns regardless of their age. Yes, they may have dreamed about flying since childhood, read all the books, and watched all the videos, but once they've strapped on an airplane, they're all newborns. Almost nothing they have done in their past has prepared them for the intensity and initial weirdness of adding a third dimension (altitude) to their lives.

In addition, during their first, important hours students suddenly find themselves totally dependent on someone else - the instructor. They depend on the CFI not only for knowledge, but for their personal safety and survival. As a brand-new student pilot, you're climbing into a machine with a complete stranger and, for the next half-dozen or so hours, only this stranger can guarantee you'll live out the day.

Learning to fly isn't like learning golf. If lightning strikes your golf instructor, you hike back to the club house, or take out your cell phone, and call 911. If your flight instructor becomes incapacitated, you're in an environment for which you are not prepared and which can definitely bend, fold, and spindle you. Even the most self-confident students are affected by the discovery that they're dependent on someone else.

This breeds an environment in which students, to one degree or another, subordinate themselves to the instructor. It's this way in all learning, but for obvious reasons it's more evident when a person learns to fly.

It's an unusual student who doesn't, at some point, think, "Hey, the guy in the right seat holds the keys to my survival, so he must be smarter than I am. At the very least, I don't know enough to question his knowledge."

The tendency to subordinate yourself to the instructor varies with each individual and with the type of airplane, but a little of it is always there and it greatly affects instructor-student communication. Because of this, communication tends to become one-way - the instructor talks and the student listens.

Of course, certain kinds of instructor personalities make this situation much worse. Instructors are normal people, which means a certain percentage of them have an attitude or presence that discourages questions. For instance, every U.S. Marine Corps recruit learns very early not to question the drill instructor. Boot camp is not a group discussion.

The cockpit has to have a modicum of the same type of authoritarianism, but not at the expense of students' faith in their own knowledge. If students don't think something is right, they should point it out and ask their flight instructor about it. The obvious question has to be, "How can a student who is brand new to something as seemingly complex as flying know enough to question what an instructor says or does?"

Actually, it's pretty easy for a student to know enough to spot mistakes or question a technique. For one, most students spend more time reading and studying flight training books than instructors do, so their book knowledge is often more current.

Instructors, especially those who have been teaching for a long time and/or those who work outside of a structured school environment, fall into an established teaching groove. They use the same basic teaching methods over and over. We instructors know how to teach the stick and rudder stuff, but maybe we haven't been keeping up with the latest regulations or new concepts of flight maneuvers.

It's unlikely a student will question a flight technique, but it's possible. For example, let's say the instructor is demonstrating an approach to a landing on a long runway, and the CFI is high. To save the landing the instructor just drops the nose to lose the altitude and burns off the extra speed this creates by floating down the long runway in ground effect. An astute student will see that this technique is different than what the instructor has been teaching the student. The student will also notice how long the airplane hangs in the air and how much runway is wasted. This seems like a good time to ask why.

Right here, where you've caught the instructor doing or saying something you're fairly certain is wrong, is where you - the student - should use a certain amount of tact. If you clap your hands, laugh hysterically, and yell, "gotcha!" it's not going to further the student/instructor relationship. In fact, the way you frame your question can make or break the relationship. If you pose your question in an adversarial way, you build an adversarial relationship. If you ask your question in a gee-I-know-you-probably-have-a-reason-but- can-you-explain-it sort of approach, you've got some two-way, give and take going that will benefit everyone.

Also, students can fall victim to the age-old CFI trap of "do as I say, not as I do." Students learn a surprising amount from duplicating what they see their instructors do, and if a CFI is saying one thing but doing something else, it's the doing, not the talking, that sticks in a student's mind.

If you have a sneaking suspicion that your CFI isn't doing something right, ask the question. Why is the CFI doing something different from what you've been told to do? Or, more likely, why is the CFI's technique different from what you've read about in the textbooks? Once a lazy CFI (there are a few of us in that category) knows you're not dozing through his mistakes, he'll know he can't get away with it and will clean up his act.

When it comes to hard facts, you'll find two areas where you're likely to catch one of us unsuspecting CFI's napping. The first is the federal aviation regulations, because we don't always catch the changes. The second is aerodynamics, because we aren't always as smart as we think we are.

CFIs are supposed to be up on all the FARs, but it's just not that way in real life. It's not unusual for a reg change to take place and some hardworking CFIs just don't catch it because they've had their shoulders to the grindstone. Or the change might be peripheral, stuff that doesn't directly affect a CFI because it's out of the instructor's area of interest or activity. We can only retain so much, so we purposely ignore some information. For example, maybe the CFI does absolutely no multiengine training and doesn't plan to do any. It's likely that the CFI's knowledge in this area will be dated, so there's a good chance of answering a question about multiengine training incorrectly.

If a current training manual says one thing but the instructor says another, then, unless there are mitigating circumstances that haven't been explained, the instructor is wrong and that's all there is to it. At that point, you again have to ask why the CFI says something different than what you've read. You're going to ask "Why is there a difference between what you say and what the book says?" rather than, "You must be wrong because the book says.?" It's a subtle change in approach, but it's the difference between building a learning bridge and coming on as an adversary.

Sometimes an instructor might say something that's incorrect and it doesn't dawn on you that it could be wrong until after you leave the airport. In that situation, scribble your question on a card. Then you can do one of two things. If the "something" is fact related, most likely you have a book at home where you can research the answer before you talk to your CFI. If your CFI is right, keep quiet and chalk it up as another time you didn't make a wrong move. If what the CFI said was vague and open to interpretation, ask about it at your next lesson.

If you find that the instructor's wrong, be tactful when you pose your question, and have your backup information available. If the instructor said something about the regulations, be aware that the old "interpretation game" may be sucking you in. The FARs seem to be vague and shrouded in shades of gray, but really they're like reading the word problems in school. "...if train A left Chicago heading east at 65 mph and...." A single word in a sentence can completely change the entire concept. Maybe your CFI is right. Maybe not - but ask the question anyway.

The right kind of CFI enjoys answering questions, even if they are aimed at the accuracy of the information the instructor gives you. For one thing, students' questions speak volumes about what students understand and where they are weak. Questions give the CFI a clue as to where to work a little harder.

If CFIs find they said or did something wrong, they'll appreciate knowing about it because it's part of the process that makes us better teachers. If we're wrong once, we're generally wrong about that specific thing over and over - and we don't want to perpetuate the wrong fact.

Just because you're a newborn student pilot, never, ever assume you don't have the ability to know when something is wrong. Yes, instructors know more than you about aviation in general, but that doesn't mean they can't make a mistake. You'd be doing both yourself and your instructor a great disservice if you don't set the record straight.