Learning beyond the lesson

A student pilot friend called the other day. He had just returned home from a particularly frustrating lesson. He said he was behind the airplane all day and believed that the lesson had been a real waste of time--and money.

"What are you going to do about it?" I asked.

"Same thing I always do," he lamented. "Go back out next week and try to do better."

If that's his solution, I said, then he'll be just as frustrated next week as he is today. Why? Learning to fly an airplane is just like learning to play golf or tennis or whatever; what you do between the "lessons" is just as important as what you do during your lesson, if not more so.

Think about your last flying lesson. How much time did you spend relearning what you did last time? The more time your instructor spends re-teaching you the basics, the less time he or she will have to teach you new material.

Take control of your learning

You have a lot more power to influence the pace at which you learn to fly than you probably think. Don't believe me? OK (100 percent honestly now), raise your hand if you have never, ever shown up for a flying lesson unprepared.

"Students can do a lot to help themselves if they'd just show up prepared," said Mike Gaffney, president of flight training for Skyline Aeronautics in Chesterfield, Missouri. "And that means being mentally and physically prepared.

"You'd be surprised how many people show up and they aren't ready to learn," he continued. "They're bouncing between all the things they have to do in their lives. They haven't opened a book or reviewed a DVD since their last lesson. Those are the things they really need to do to be ready to do the things their instructor is going to talk to them about."

"It's often said that the cockpit is the worst classroom," explained J.J. Greenway, chief flight instructor for the AOPA Air Safety Foundation. "Once you've broken ground, it's too late to introduce a new concept or idea for the first time." That's why Greenway stressed the need to have a comprehensive preflight briefing with a student--a briefing that he prefers to be as long as the flight itself. "Every maneuver can be discussed in detail, so there are no surprises once you get in the cockpit," he said.

Yes, you can consider the time you spend before you climb into the left seat as "beyond the lesson." (If you're anything like most students, any time that the engine is not running is considered beyond the lesson.)

In fact, if you're serious about becoming the best, and by that I mean the safest, pilot you can possibly be, you will expand your learning well outside the cockpit of any aircraft. "Whether you have 300 or 3,000 hours, you never, ever stop learning," Michael Leighton, a CFI and aviation writer from Boynton Beach, Florida, said. "When I started flying jets and turboprops I loved to fly with the 25,000-hour guys. They made the 'impossible' seem like breathing. They taught me a lot."

"Student pilots have to understand that aviation is an incredibly complicated, incredibly deep, and incredibly varied avocation," he continued. "I still read the regulations all the time, and I encourage my students to also. So they are no longer relying on me for the information, they are learning to find it for themselves. "That's an important mindset for the student to acquire," Leighton said. "You need to push yourself to want to know more than your instructor volunteers to tell you. Extracting the most from your training dollars requires the student to do most of the work."

1. Know what you need to know. Being unprepared is the biggest mistake. Make sure you and your instructor are on the proverbial same page when it comes to expectations before you strap in. "After every flight, I provide my students with a detailed form summarizing what we just covered and what we are going to cover on the next lesson," explained Linda Dowdy, owner of SimuFlight Minnesota in Blaine, Minnesota. "What we did doesn't just go in their logbooks; we discuss it in detail. If they have any questions, I encourage them to ask while it is still fresh in their minds.

"Then they get the form, along with any handouts I've prepared for the next lesson," she continued. "I also strongly encourage them to have a notebook and to write down their own notes from each lesson. I think that helps with the retention process."

2. It takes time to learn. Analyze how much time you schedule for a lesson. A two-hour block may seem like a long time for a lesson, but it's not. "Not leaving enough time for the entire lesson is a problem," Greenway said. "A one-hour [logged time] lesson should take a good instructor and a serious student approximately three hours."

That's an hour discussing what you are going to do, including answering any lingering questions from your last lesson, then an hour in the air, and--finally--about a half-hour discussing what you did and the last 30 minutes going over what you need to study to be ready for next time.

If your instructor barely waits for the prop to stop spinning before he or she dashes off to the next student, you're getting shortchanged. Make sure you schedule extra time before and after the lesson to cover the important points in detail.

You may not be pilot in command, but you can certainly act as student in command of your training program.

3. You think, therefore you fly... Another post-flight learning tool is mental imagery. "I think a big thing is something every student should do after they get home," Gaffney said. "Sit down in a comfortable chair, close your eyes and mentally go through the entire flight again--in detail.

"Think of holding the checklist; the runup; takeoff--whatever you did, try and feel the controls," he explained. "Literally follow yourself in the airplane as you fly around. It's like two lessons for the price of one, and I don't think many students take advantage of it. I know most instructors never think of suggesting it." (I can tell you first-hand this one really works. It's a great way to build and reinforce muscle memory.)

Another advantage of this mental "re-flight" is now that your mind can think clearly, you'll have questions about things that happened up there. Have a pad and write them down to ask your instructor before your next lesson. It's a good idea to e-mail them ahead, if possible, so your instructor can work them into the next preflight briefing.

4. Look for "free" lessons. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there are plenty of opportunities for free training outside your lesson. National events like AOPA Expo, Sun 'n Fun, or EAA AirVenture, and regional fly-ins at an airport near you, are loaded with all kinds of seminars. The AOPA Air Safety Foundation may offer a safety seminar near you--or you can take a free online safety seminar any time.

"The FAA puts on lots of regional programs as part of its Wings program," Leighton said. "They cover all kinds of important stuff. It may be fundamental, but you have to remember, as a student pilot or a new private or instrument pilot, pretty much everything is fundamental to you anyway."

Another great "free" learning opportunity is to ride in the backseat of a four-place aircraft while another student takes a lesson. While this idea is popular with instrument students, it can be just as beneficial for primary students. "The value is immeasurable," Greenway said. "You might see another student make a mistake and swear you'll never make that one yourself--but when you're up there you do.

"I call it 'arm's length' flight training," he continued. "Remove yourself more than an arm's length from the instrument panel and you have a whole new perspective."

5. Hang around with other pilots. "I think most students miss out on the opportunity to learn from other pilots and students," Dowdy said. "Sometimes hearing other people share their experiences makes it so much easier to relate and learn that you're not the only one going through the process."

Leighton believes that one of the best ways to learn beyond the lesson is to listen to what other pilots have experienced. He's compiled a lot of his personal experiences into a book titled Things My Flight Instructor Never Told Me. "Hangar flying is invaluable," he said. "Anything that puts you in contact with other people who share the same passion you have should be looked at as a valuable learning opportunity."

6. Do something different. "I've flown with 5,000-hour pilots who hadn't really done anything but fly the same hour 5,000 times," Leighton said. "It's a problem student pilots encounter all the time--they fly to the same places over and over again."

"It's important for students and instructors to recognize the value of diversification in the training program," he continued. "Pick a different airport to fly to next time and do all the planning. Know the frequencies, runway information, traffic patterns. It's a great exercise in planning."

I once had an instructor ask me to plan a trip to an unfamiliar airport. It wasn't until I started going through the process that I learned that it only had a grass runway. So I had to read up on all the various landing and takeoff techniques I was going to need.

7. Know what you don't know. I know we covered being prepared, but the CFIs interviewed for this story and I all believe strongly that it is the most important thing a student can do to not only make the most of each lesson, but make the most out of each opportunity to learn beyond the lesson.

One of the most effective tools you can use is to have a copy of your instructor's curriculum and follow it. "While flight training is where you pull it all together, preparation is where you lay down a good foundation of core knowledge and skills," Gaffney said. "So trying to learn without knowing what is expected of you is a big problem for a lot of students."

"After all," he concluded, "you can't learn beyond the lesson, if you don't know what the lesson is."

Dale Smith is an aviation journalist living in Jacksonville, Florida. A private pilot, he has been flying since 1975.