Here's a personal example of an unusual way a student's brain worked: I recently had a student who was a well-experienced, high-time pilot. I was transitioning him into a high-performance tailwheel airplane, a Pitts Special. This particular student brought much more to the table than most do, and he had a lot of tailwheel time coupled with lots of hours in high-performance airplanes. I expected this to be a no-sweat transition. But it wasn't. At least it wasn't until he explained to me why we were having problems.
As we'd close on the runway, I'd tell him to move the airplane right or left, and almost immediately things would begin to come unraveled. He'd be doing fine until I'd say something and, just that quickly, stuff would instantly hit the fan.
Four times in a row, as we were rolling to a stop and I asked him to turn left onto the taxiway, he'd start to go in the other direction and would then lose control of the airplane. I was mystified. He flew much better than average, but as soon as I'd give him an instruction, something awful would happen. It got to where I was afraid to open my mouth. This makes teaching very difficult.
He recognized he was having problems and finally said, "Look, I have to tell you something. I can generally figure things out for myself, but as soon as I'm told to do something, part of my brain disconnects from what I'm doing to concentrate on the new instruction. This is especially true when I'm asked to go left or right. For some reason, I have to stop to think about left and right, and that always causes me problems."
I sat in that little cockpit and tried to come up with ways to communicate that didn't require him to think. Next time around instead of saying, "Move to the left," I said, "Move toward the centerline." No problem. Instead of saying, "Turn right onto the taxiway," I said, "Turn toward the tower." Just that quickly our problems disappeared, although it did tie my brain in knots trying to come up with phrases that didn't include right and left.
In 36 years of instructing, I'd never seen that difficulty before. No, let me correct that. I may have seen it, but because my student didn't tell me what was going on in his or her head, I didn't recognize the problem.
As I thought about it, I realized that this was just one of lots of unique thought patterns that students exhibit in the cockpit. However, before anyone starts thinking that people behave differently in the cockpit than they do in real life, that's not so. People bring their personalities and their own way of thinking with them. They don't suddenly develop a new thought pattern just because they are flying.
Certainly the most common my-brain-doesn't-want-to-cooperate-today episodes aren't actually mental processing problems. They are a function of being in an environment that is so new and strange - and potentially overwhelming - that the student brings no useful instincts with him. In any new environment, there's a period of time during which part of the brain is overwhelmed and has a difficult time coping. When that happens, the brain often will pick out what it can absorb and ignore the rest.
These kinds of problems, however, aren't really brain-related difficulties, and they will go away as exposure to the new environment increases. What we are worried about are chronic mental processing problems that interfere with learning. These could probably be classed as learning deficiencies, but that somehow seems too strong. What we're really discussing is determining the best way for information to be presented in these situations so that a student can readily absorb it, and some folks require a totally different approach.
Most students fit one of a couple of dozen patterns, and after the instructor has seen a few hundred students, he or she will know approximately where to start in the bell-shaped instructional curve, and will adjust to match the student. Once in a while, however, a CFI will run across an anomaly such as the right-left example above. We may never have seen this kind of thought pattern before. The student, however, has lived with it his entire life - and don't kid yourself; the student knows it's there. Just because he is in a cockpit doesn't mean this is the first time he's been a student. He had to learn to drive. Maybe he had to wade through calculus; or learn to swim; or tried out golf, motorcycles, photography, writing, water-skiing, etc.; and he knows if he's had a hard time of it.
The student knows she sometimes has trouble learning. She may not know the exact reason why but she usually has an inkling of what's going on. The instructor, on the other hand, doesn't have a clue unless the student tells him. His bag of instructional tricks is geared toward the average student. If he's been at it a long time, he may have some specialized tricks he's developed for special students he's experienced ("Move toward center line"), but for the most part he observes the student and tries various methods until he finds the one that fits. Sometimes that takes a few minutes, sometimes a few hours. In the unusual cases, however, the fit never happens, and the instructor doesn't know why. The student probably does, but the instructor doesn't.
If the student I mentioned hadn't told me what he was experiencing, I absolutely guarantee you that I never would have figured it out. I've flown with well over a thousand students, but that one would have kept me guessing right to the bitter end. The final result might have been that his own frustration would have mutated into apprehension and then outright self-doubt, and that's the worst thing a CFI can see happen to a student.
The obvious cure is for the student to tell the instructor when the method being used isn't working for him or her. It may be something as simple as "Hey, when we get on the ground, can you sketch this out for me? I'm a very visual learner and I need to picture what's supposed to be going on."
When a student says something like that, it kicks the door to learning wide open and the instructor wants to give him or her a kiss (figuratively speaking, that is).
Most of the more common learning difficulties, which may or may not be picked up by an instructor, are well known. However, that doesn't mean a given instructor has seen them all. The following examples are a few observations from one man's career and far from a complete compilation of learning "gotchas" that can pop up.
Easily distracted
A few people, students or not, are easily distracted by certain types of external stimuli. One of the top offenders is a background conversation that their mind can't ignore. Radio transmissions fall into that category. For instance, when a student is struggling to land an airplane, tower transmissions can often be the difference between a good and a bad landing. One instance involved a former student who was landing on a set of parallel runways. When the tower asked him which runway he was lined up with, he started a conversation with the controller, which diverted his attention, and he forgot to fly his airplane. He dropped it in from 20 feet and bent the gear, the prop, and the left wing. I had specifically told him not to fly his airplane because he was still too easily distracted - an assessment that proved to be more accurate than I wished.
In most cases, as we gain experience we erect barriers against distractions as we simultaneously develop the ability to keep several balls in the air. It takes long-term exposure for flying skill to mutate into instinct, which then allows you to shift focus from one item to the next. For some people, the barriers come up quickly. For others, it is a constant fight to focus on the flying and ignore the distractions.
Capacitance brains
One of the more frustrating, and potentially dangerous, brain operating systems is what I call the capacitance brain, and I'm not even certain most students know they have it. The way a capacitor works is that it stores up electricity until it is suddenly released. The thought patterns, which parallel this, manifest themselves in a saw-tooth way of reacting: The student is told to do something. Nothing happens. He or she is told again. Nothing happens. She is told again. Nothing happens for a second. Then it is as if a capacitor were fired in his brain, and he moves too much and too late. For CFIs, these are the most difficult - and exciting - students to teach.
Examples personally experienced include a student slowly wandering toward the edge of the runway on takeoff in a Piper Cherokee. Repeatedly told to correct, he suddenly jammed the rudder completely to the floor in the wrong direction. Another, when told to bring the nose up during the flare, jerked the yoke all the way aft to the stop, thoroughly stalling the airplane and dropping it onto the ground. Fortunately, no damage was sustained in either instance.
Often the only way to get situations like these under control is to make the student aware of it. In one instance, the student said, "Yeah, I can see myself doing it, but don't know how to stop it. It's like the thought to do something repeats itself inside my head, and I know I should do it, but for some reason I hesitate. Then I realize too late what's happening and always overdo it."
This is a worrisome trait because training won't necessarily control it, and in stressful situations it almost always returns.
Wrong instincts bred of bad habits
Instincts are the result of doing something over and over until the individual doesn't have to think about it. Sometimes these instincts are forced upon the pilot by instruction. Sometimes they are simply the result of doing something the same way over and over. Unfortunately, sometimes when the instruction or the repeated motion is wrong, the instincts it breeds are also wrong.
Every instructor knows the following is etched in stone: It's far easier to teach someone to fly from scratch than it is to undo bad instruction or bad habits. This is a learning difficulty that is easy to point out, difficult to cure, and frustrating to both the student and the instructor. Having done something the same way for a long time means that part of your brain is programmed to act a certain way at a certain time. The CFI has to try to deprogram that portion of your brain or create a higher level of understanding of the maneuver or principle involved, using knowledge to eradicate the previous errors - which probably were being committed at the rote, or lowest, level of learning.
The difficulties arrive when, during dual instruction, the student starts doing it right and an erroneous assumption is made that all is well. The dangerous thing about instincts borne of prior bad instruction is that they lie beneath the surface of a person's mental processes for a long time until they are overcome by extended usage of the new techniques and new instincts are developed. This can take time. If during the period in which a person is developing new instincts something critical should happen, it's almost guaranteed that the pilot will revert to old instincts, and this is not good.
When correcting bad instruction or bad habits, a few hours of mistake-free flying doesn't mean the problem has gone away. Liberal uses of instructional overkill are necessary to ensure none of the problems will come back.
Language difficulties
In many ways learning to fly involves learning a new language, and some folks are obviously much better at languages than others. A few have a filter that blocks the understanding of new words until they've had to deal with them over and over. Unfortunately, like learning mathematics, until you understand the terms there is no possible way you can deal with the concepts. Far too often a student sits there listening to the CFI, and the unfamiliar phrases ricochet off her brain, leaving no meaning behind.
Although the CFI should always try to speak a language the student understands, the best way he or she knows that they are talking over the student's head is when the student puts his hands together in a time-out "T" and says, "Wait a minute. Exactly what does 'flare' mean?" If the student doesn't do that, it's not long before he is sinking in a morass of misunderstandings and is struggling to keep up. Students have to speak up.
Visual versus technical
Do you learn best by having something diagrammed out and the concepts explained or do you learn best by having it explained while it's being demonstrated? Although the best approach is to do both (teach the concept then demonstrate it), a few people are totally one way or the other, and only they know who they are. For that reason, as a student, it's important to point out to the instructor whether his chalkboard session is leaving you in the dust or not. Some students need every nuance described ahead of time. It needs to be diagrammed with vectors and lines. Others can't make any sense at all out of the visuals until they've gotten out there and tried it. All a student has to say is, "I'm not certain what you're trying to tell me," and the instructor instantly knows that he has to change approaches.
Analyze yourself
The list could go on for pages, but you get the drift of it. The bottom line is that only you know how you learn. And maybe even you don't know because you've never thought about it. This is the time to think about it. Before you see your CFI for your next hop, sit down and think really hard about how past lessons have gone and why you did, or didn't, learn as well as you would have liked. Analyze yourself and your instructor's approach. Then sit down with him and let him know what you discovered about yourself and his flight training. Not only will he thank you profusely, but also the learning will proceed much better from that point on.
Budd Davisson is an aviation writer/photographer and magazine editor who has written approximately 2,200 articles and has flown more than 300 different types of aircraft. A CFI for 36 years, he teaches about 30 hours a month in his S-2A Pitts Special.
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