Not exactly. Cooped up in a minivan with one of our local designated examiners on darkened Interstate 95 on the return from dinner at a Maine fishing lodge, I took advantage of our confinement to solicit his report card on the local flight training scene. He, more than anyone, knew whether the CFIs hereabouts were turning out good products-and if not, why not.
Flight instructors should consider such opportunities as a professional obligation. Think of it as a combination of due diligence and market research.
Having been offered a chance to expound, he did not hold back. At that time, in the summer of 1998, he had just failed a private pilot applicant over a botched short-field landing, and he seemed to be brooding a little over the flight. Well, it wasn't really the landing that downed the student. It was the belated decision to go around that got him, the examiner said. The examiner had seen a lot of poor decision-making skills lately. I did not have any private pilot applicants in the pipeline at that time, but I took mental notes for the future.
For a CFI, it's instructive to know problems that your local examiners have been seeing. If you are a student pilot, it is worth knowing whether past students trained by your instructor were consistently weak in particular areas-because you can rest assured that your own checkride's spotlight will shine on those same tasks. Of course your CFI is your friend and teacher, but there's nothing wrong with asking around if your instructor seems reticent to discuss any recent failures. You, after all, will be the one undergoing the scrutiny, although the results of your checkride will also have implications for the CFI.
The minivan excursion was not the first time that I had conducted this kind of field research. A veteran examiner who used to do the majority of private, instrument, and commercial checkrides around here would readily, over a bowl of chowder at the local seafood emporium, discuss at great length the strengths and weaknesses that he was seeing in applicants and their teachers. This was valuable intelligence, free (or, at most, the cost of a cup of soup) for the asking.
He, too, placed a high value on decision making in the broad sense as opposed, say, to the assessment of a specific maneuver. I also recall that on several occasions he had expressed shock over the poor preparation of the paperwork brought to the big event by applicants. CFIs took a lot of criticism for this-in a couple of cases, actually sending ineligible applicants for tests-but why didn't the students know that they weren't ready? This examiner wondered about ground training and whether anyone was bothering to read the very clear training and flight time requirements given in the practical test standards (PTS) and the federal aviation regulations (FARs).
There is another designated examiner who hangs out his shingle in these parts, and while Sandy Reynolds and I have never crewed a minivan together, this seemed like a poor reason to exclude him from my ongoing examiner poll. So I got him on the telephone recently and fired off the usual questions. He thought back on about 20 checkrides given in the course of a year, and then he cut to the chase. Here is his detailed analysis:
Knowledge of weather was tops on his list of not-good-enoughs. Not knowledge of weather reports-knowledge of weather. They're not the same thing. He opined that "the practical test standards don't really call for any basic weather understanding," such as how fronts develop in the big picture, what characteristics they will display, and how such developments might affect a proposed flight. (This is food for thought, and I share his view.) The PTS does indeed seem ambiguous here. It says that "various sources" of weather information must be evaluated by an applicant, but the emphasis should be on pireps, sigmets, airmets, and wind shear reports. These are important, but do they give the big picture? I don't think so. Also, if an applicant can read the necessary reports and forecasts and "make a competent go/no-go decision," he or she will satisfy PTS requirements. But is competent the same as prudent?
We could debate that one all day, but Reynolds moved on to his next topic-pilot skill in forced landings. Over time, those skills have been eroding, he said. And he thinks he knows why. It starts with learning how to make good, normal landings.
"When I learned [to fly], you added carb heat, retarded the throttle, and glided to the runway. It was bad form to add power. They were called power-off spot landings. So the previous generation was better at power-off landings," he said. But, in a change of teaching method reminiscent of the ongoing debate over whether performing spins in training increases or decreases the number of spin accidents, a number of "come-up-short accidents"-perhaps caused by a failure to avoid carburetor ice-discouraged the common use of power-off glides when teaching normal landings, he recalled. (The lack of flexibility in busy traffic patterns, especially at towered airports, is probably another reason the method is impractical in some places today.)
Anything else?
"Pilotage skills are deteriorating," he said with a trace of a grumble in his voice. As black boxes get smarter, will pilots get?? It can't hurt to ask the question. And we can't blame vagueness in the PTS here. Pilots are still required to follow a course by pilotage, use dead reckoning, and reconcile actual performance with groundspeeds calculated during flight planning. But just as the average person started gaining weight when the automobile and the television came along, we have less work to do nowadays when finding our way through the skies. (CFI's: Do your students a favor and keep this technological revolution in your back pocket until your students can do it the old-fashioned way. Frisk them for handheld devices before solo cross-countries. Just kidding?I think. Navigating "the way it used to be" will also give you something to do in two years when your former students ring you up for their first biennial flight review. If they proudly produce a fancy black box with the intention of chasing it around the sky for a couple of hours, reach over, shut it off, and announce, "That just quit." Throw in some CFI-induced simulated weather to take their minds off the loss of the nav unit.)
Anything else?
Well then, the examiner said, there are always the "perennials" of checkride weaknesses, and among them, the mother of all weak links remains "real mastery of crosswind landings. It won't come in three or four hours. So they muddle through." He did not leave this subject before commenting that there are a lot of instructors out there who could use a few hours in a nice, gusty side-blowing breeze before passing on their "knowledge" to their students. And having worked as one of his instructors when he was chief pilot at a local flight school some years ago, I can testify firsthand that he practices what he preaches here. On days when there were whitecaps in the office coffeepot, Reynolds was out shooting landings with students, which also meant that I was out shooting crosswind landings with students. I hope that those students recognize the value of the training they received. Here again, the practical test standards are blameless for the lapses-the PTS covers the necessary bases for both the checkride and real life. This is one area of training where "pounding away" does indeed pay dividends far in excess of the cost of the flight time involved.
So that's the latest from my corner of Examiner Land. There will be other rides in minivans, and I will report back on any changes in trends.
Students: Use this information to make sure that your CFIs are giving you the training you need to be safe and competent, and to avoid being sent unknowingly into a checkride ambush. Instructors: Find out what your examiners have been seeing lately, and take advantage of what your peers and their students may have learned the hard way. Or buy your local examiner a bowl of chowder and listen to what he or she has to say. Perhaps they have been waiting for just such an opportunity to speak out.
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