Pilotage

To airplane pilots, there is only one seat in the house worth occupying: the one up front, on the left. It's the pilot-in-command perch. Unless you're instructing, flying as a first officer, or have a single- or tandem-seater, you fly an airplane from the left seat. I'm neither an airline pilot nor flight instructor, but I enjoy the occasional chance to sit in the right seat, watch someone else fly, and advise. They say you really learn how to fly when you begin to instruct and, based on my adviser experience, I believe this to be true.

There's another truth that I've come to recognize about advising a pilot from the right seat versus formally instructing a student. The latter is difficult, while the former is pretty darn easy. A flight instructor has a weighty responsibility to teach properly, accurately, and effectively. An instructor gets paid (though not nearly enough) to do an important job. An adviser is a colleague, and probably a friend, who shares and trades suggestions and technique, a safety pilot who gets no compensation other than perhaps a free burger for lunch.

My friend Chester called to ask if I would accompany him on an overnight trip in his rented Cessna 172. A 150-hour private pilot, Chester is eager to build time and experience. This would be his first long business-related cross-country, and although the weather forecasts were good, he wanted to ensure that he could complete the trip.

Before embarking I reminded myself that a critique-happy right-seater can quickly become an annoyance, especially to the tender ego of a novice pilot — who's paying for the flight, no less. I resolved to go easy on Chester and let him, as the PIC, call the shots.

"Whaddya want me to do?" I asked with a helpful tone after we had strapped in. "I'll work the radios, or not. It's your call," I said.

Chester as-signed me the radios. I assigned myself the job of overseer, keeper of safety. You know — the experienced flier protectively watching over the fledgling.

The first thing the old-hand pilot did was to give the fledgling the incorrect runway alignment heading to crank into the directional gyro. The error wasn't discovered until we were level at 3,000 feet and wondering why there was a discrepancy between the magnetic compass and the DG. However, the experienced pro deftly turned his faux pas into an opportunity to impart a lesson. "See, now there's an example of how two pilots who aren't practiced in crew coordination can perform worse than a single pilot."

After that we settled down into a routine of him flying, and me critiquing. Chester wanted to use his new handheld moving-map GPS. I felt he was spending too much time with his head down, punching buttons and scrutinizing the little GPS screen. Meanwhile, the airplane drifted off the desired heading.

One of Chester's objectives for the trip was to use the GPS and learn all of its functions and capabilities. That's fine, but I saw Chester devoting too much of his attention to the GPS and not enough to scanning for traffic and flying the airplane precisely. At an opportune moment I took the GPS from him and said that he'd have to rely on — Gasp! — VORs and possibly even dead reckoning for navigation guidance. Chester sulked.

Periodically I would challenge him with, "What's your heading?" Of course, I asked the question only when he was off the desired heading. When I detected other mistakes, I spouted technique — on use of checklists, rotation and liftoff, trim management, descent planning, flap deployment, tracking the runway centerline, and configuring the airplane after exiting the runway.

This went on for much of the two-day trip. On the afternoon of the second day, I could sense Chester's frustration building. Mine, too — my frequent admonitions to hold heading apparently weren't being heard above the din of engine, propeller, and slipstream, even though both of us were wearing headsets.

I wondered why Chester wasn't eagerly absorbing all of the wisdom that I was dispensing. And I think that he was still sore that I wouldn't let him play with the GPS. That's when I realized I had become the pilot's equivalent of a backseat driver. Chester was tuning me out.

Still hoping to make the flight a positive learning experience for Chester, if not myself, I turned the tables. I told Chester that I would fly from the right seat, but that he would have to tell me what to do — how to navigate, when to turn, when to descend. In other words, I would function as an autopilot that would respond to his verbal commands.

It worked. Chester flew with renewed enthusiam. He got to play the dual roles of pilot and observer, and that big-picture perspective gave him insight into his own technique. When you recognize the mistakes of others, it helps you to spot and correct your own.

One pilot's observing another can be a valuable learning experience for each. That's why some flight schools put an observer student in the rear seat on instructional flights. However, it's easy for an experienced pilot riding along with a less-experienced pilot to fall into the trap of over-critiquing and, in the eyes of the fledgling, turning into a critic. It takes a sensitive ear and judicious restraint to know how much of a good thing is enough.

My turn came a couple of weeks later when I checked out in a Cessna Cardinal RG owned by the Cub Club in Fort Myers, Florida. I flew with Doug Keene, an instructor who observed and critiqued my performance from the right seat. Too bad Chester wasn't along. He would have enjoyed seeing me on the receiving end of Doug's backseat driving.