At the root of this effort is a simple concept: We're going to discipline ourselves so that every minute we're in the air is invested wisely and aimed at keeping our skills current and improving.
| Take a flight instructor to help you polish those maneuvers that aren't quite what they should be. |
| Institute a two-landing rule in which the first is a touch and go and the second a full-stop landing--to stretch your stick-and-rudder skills further. |
| Going to the same old restaurant for your hamburger flights? Find a new airport that gives you a different learning experience. |
1. Make each flight an experiment in improving
It takes very little time and costs nothing, yet just shifting your attitude from "I'm having a good time" to "I'm having a good time while I make sure everything I do is right" will yield tremendous benefits.
If we simply climb into the airplane and do everything by habit, then what we wind up with is yesterday's flight flown again today. Other than enjoyment or some utility, nothing will have been gained from the flight. A hundred hours later what you'll have is the same hour flown a hundred times. This is not how your flying improves.
It improves by first becoming acutely aware of the tiniest details that make up what you are doing. The pilot notices, critiques everything he does, and resolves to do it better. Maybe it is something as minor as taxiing off the centerline of the taxiway where, with just a little effort, he can split the stripe with the nosewheel. It's a small thing, but it's the difference between doing it right and just doing it.
2. Identify areas of fear and challenge them
Very few of us are comfortable in every flight regime. Maybe hard crosswinds make our mouth dry on final, or we get nervous every time the ceiling starts to come down (that's common sense, by the way), or we avoid runways shorter than 2,000 feet. Rather than continuing to walk wide around those uncomfortable areas, let's attack them head-on and purposely poke our nose into areas we would have avoided in the past. If necessary we'll do it with a certificated flight instructor (CFI) on board.
The nice thing about having a qualified CFI along in what we consider to be dicey flight situations is it calms us down. With a CFI to share the burden, we're much more willing to face our demons.
3. Use a CFI to strengthen your weak areas
The difference between being afraid of some realm of flight and knowing that we're weak in that area is subtle but real. There may be something that you know you should be doing better and you're not afraid of it, but try as you may, you just can't get it right. You can see the point on the runway where you want to land, or you know you want to maintain a certain attitude, but you just can't make it happen.
Most of the time it will take an instructor a few minutes to point out what you're not doing quite right, or to enable you see your mistakes. Those subtle little things that we don't see are what create holes in our flying skills, and that's the CFI's strong point. He's seeing you from the outside, which makes it easier to spot an imperfect technique.
4. Annual flight reviews are better than biennial ones
One of the surest ways to halt any skill erosion is to schedule at least an hour with a CFI, once a year, whether we think we need it or not. Maybe schedule it as a reward the same week you go for your annual checkup (you do see a doctor once a year, don't you?). The goal of this flight is to evaluate every aspect of your flying. It's sort of a private pilot checkride all over again, but the limits are going to be different.
The checkride is a coarse-screen filter that identifies only the largest lumps in your flying. The goal of this flight is to check every area, but to tightened limits, and you will come away with a checklist of what needs to be improved. There is no pass or fail.
Before the flight, the two of you will sit down with the Private Pilot Practical Test Standards to see what needs to be covered and determine the limits to which you'll be held. A private pilot candidate can get away with plus or minus 100 feet of altitude on downwind. Surely you can do with half that amount of margin. The PTS says final is to be flown minus five knots to plus 10 knots and, again, you should be able to hold it plus or minus--oh, let's pick a number, how about three knots either way? You'll come away from this flight with an accurate picture of yourself as a pilot and know what areas to work on.
5. Get a new rating or endorsement
One of the many reasons our skills drift downhill is that we sit in the middle of our comfort zone and see few challenges. Our brain and our skills atrophy. So, let's go take some fun dual that'll not only wake up our learning receptors but will get the juices flowing again.
This is the kind of thing that can be tailored to fit anyone's budget. It's not necessary to drop a bundle getting a helicopter rating. Something as simple as going for a complex airplane endorsement or checking out in a new model quite often presents enough challenges.
Getting a tailwheel endorsement is another relatively inexpensive adventure that not only opens a whole new world of interesting airplanes to fly, but it'll also challenge your basic flying skills. Of all the endorsements, this is probably the biggest bang for the buck in the way it affects your skills.
From multiengine flying to floats, tailwheel, and so forth, there are easily a dozen new areas for your logbook that will put you back in student mode and force you to improve.
6. Institute a two-landing rule
Every single stick-and-rudder skill you've ever learned is used in landing an airplane. It's all there, crammed into two or three minutes of excitement. So, make it a habit to never make just one landing. Always make the first one a touch and go, and then go back around to do it one more time. Of course, you can always make it a three-landing rule, not two.
7. Change up your hamburger flights
You won't find statistics on hamburger flights on the FAA's Web site, but if you could, you might find that a significant number of general aviation flights are for that purpose. It's also probable that a large portion are repeat flights to favorite hangouts. That's only natural, but it also limits the learning value of a hamburger.
Since everyone makes hamburger runs, they should be constructed in such a way that they are learning experiences, and the best way to do that is to vary locations. The more different airports a pilot visits, the more his flying will improve. Unfamiliar runways always challenge the pilot because we don't realize how comfortable we've become with our home runway. Granted, some burgers are better than others, but improving always includes sacrifices.
8. Avoid long layoffs, if possible
Yeah, we know: The weather up north can be putrid for months on end. But it's not always unflyable, and every day we spend on the ground is a day that more of our skill fades. This doesn't mean that you're out there flying under 600-foot ceilings, but it does mean that if the forecast is for VFR conditions and it's not too cold to get an engine started, you brave the weather, whenever practical, and do it.
Of course it's more fun to fly when it's warm and beautiful, but if we want to be in condition to go flying on the warm and beautiful days, we'd be smart to fly on a few cold and ugly ones to keep up our proficiency. Besides, nothing will make us appreciate a beautiful day more than flying on an ugly one.
9. Fly some actual short fields
Earlier we said that everything we know about flying an airplane is applied during a landing. Landings are our best proficiency-building tool, but it becomes even more so when we land on actual short runways. No, we're not challenging an 800-foot stretch of scrub brush in the bottom of a canyon. We're talking about runways that are much shorter than what you're used to, whatever that is.
For many general aviation training aircraft, actual short-field landing techniques are seldom needed on runways shorter than 1,500 feet. Precise aviating will suffice. Still, since most of us fly out of 2,500-foot to 4,500-foot runways, anything under 2,000 feet begins to look short. So, it's a good place to practice short-field techniques, which will force us to ratchet up the attention we pay to speed, glideslope, and touchdown point. Shoot some landings on a shorter-than-you're-used-to runway and you can't help but improve.
10. Develop a performance checklist
We have Before Starting, Before Takeoff, Before Landing, and Post-Flight checklists, but we don't have a While Flying checklist. Why don't we have a checklist clipped to the panel that spells out exactly what the parameters are for each segment of flight and requires us to match those parameters? It could be used to check our performance.
This mythical list could require us to do things such as:
Climb speed: 85 mph;
Ball exactly centered;
Wings level;
Cruise at rpm 2,400, maintaining an altitude of 3,500 feet and heading of 332 degrees
OK, so we don't have to actually make up a hard-copy list and stick it on the panel, but we do have an idea of what we're supposed to be doing, and that's our checklist. If we know we're supposed to be at 3,500 feet, heading 332 degrees, and cruise rpm is 2,400, then those are the numbers we should be shooting for. Forcing a little precision on ourselves will force us to improve.
We've listed 10 suggestions in the form of actual approaches we can embark on to improve. However, the only point that really counts is the one mentioned at the very beginning--change our attitude from "it's good enough" to "it can't be too good." If our attitude is that we want to improve, then we will improve.
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 since 1967, he teaches about 30 hours a month in his Pitts S-2A Special. Visit his Web site.
Want to know more?
Links to additional resources about the topics discussed in this article are available at AOPA Flight Training Online.
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