A view of the 'big picture' concept
The FAA produces overwhelming quantities of information in the form of studies, statistics, and handbooks to guide the aviation industry toward safer, more efficient skies. These include many guises of psychology, both general and educational. The Aviation Instructor's Handbook (FAA-H-8083-9) grants instructors some basic guidance in this, but truly fortunate are those future flight instructors who take aviation-specific formal courses in educational psychology or in testing and measurement. Recently, while teaching these courses of study, I saw questioning looks as our class compared takeoff and landing safety margins to levels of risk at the beginning and ending of flight. These are the sorts of issues with which your designated pilot examiner (DPE) should be very familiar.
The cause of these instructor candidates' intrigue was my comparison of the relationships between takeoff and initial climb accidents to landing accidents. Each appears in table 9-8 of the Aviation Instructor's Handbook, each standing almost identically at approximately 24 percent of aircraft accidents. But, examining the nicely illustrated "Operational Pitfalls" diagram, Figure 9-13, questioners see that their margin of safety becomes significantly less in the approach and landing phase than they enjoy in the takeoff and initial climb phase. These burgeoning instructor minds had just been introduced to the need for what one might term concept accuracy, which points to a larger and often ignored need on the part of all of us who profess the ability to prepare you for your coming aviation career.
By the way, what some have assumed to be a handbook discrepancy is no discrepancy at all. The "Operational Pitfalls" diagram is not stating accident percentages; it notes phases of flight wherein factors conspire to reduce safety. Approaches to landing occur at the termination of a flight, which may have been long and perhaps quite exhausting. With fatigue, human performance declines.
It would be entirely reasonable for the FAA to anticipate that a safer aviation industry will result through aviators whose understanding of human factors strengthens their mindset regarding individual phases of flight. The FAA has long assumed that an individual DPE's experience and knowledge would automatically guide the aviation community into that thought process. To a degree, it has.
In many regards, your flight instructor must think like the FAA's ideal of a pilot examiner, looking not only at the immediate goal of your performing the task at hand safely, or the intermediate goal of your performing it consistently to standards; but also at your career in the form of a mentality that values safety and efficiency above all else.
These things are important to you if you are to receive a good-quality practical test. Your flight instructor most likely was more recently certified as a flight instructor than was your DPE. That means that your CFI was likely exposed to a greater level of training in this area than was your DPE during his initial flight instructor training. Your DPE has had more opportunity to observe, thereby confirming or rejecting much of the testing psychology to which he or she was originally exposed. This is likely one of the reasons why, despite decades of FAA attempts to standardize the testing process, noteworthy differences occur between DPEs.
For example, the Aviation Instructor's Handbook is clear that, when your CFI teaches to you new material, the logical steps involved center on your CFI's preparation and presentation of the material, your application of it, and the review/evaluation. To the FAA, "preparation" means an instructor should have a written lesson plan that defines the material to be covered by outlining the lesson objectives, goals to be attained, supplies and equipment needed, and their availability and usefulness. Among other things, a lesson plan promotes uniformity of instruction. The DPE who administers your checkride is similarly guided by a plan of action, which he or she is to physically utilize during the test.
You should be evaluated on your performance and the attainment of the stated objectives and goals at the end of each step in the learning (or testing) process. Deficiencies and faults should be carefully noted so that your CFI can take steps to remedy them in further training. Since your DPE is required to provide a debriefing, the plan of action provides the means to accurately apprise you of strengths and weaknesses demonstrated during the test. It is next to impossible to do this by memory alone.
Because flight instructors have a unique responsibility of criticizing a student's actions in order to create with that student a foundation on which to evaluate their own performance, DPEs find evidence that instructors are not doing this when their applicants respond obliquely to the DPE's post-test debriefing. At issue is the educational fact that a critique is an integral part of the learning process. Students whose CFIs routinely finish an instructional flight with nothing more than a flourish in the logbook and a "See you tomorrow!" are denied an essential element of learning: the support and guidance of an objective friend.
Flight instructors can become mired in life's mundane needs to provide shelter and feed the family. Pilot examiners struggle to maintain their positions in the community and in the company. Students fight against the thousands of obstacles to simply launch a career. For everyone, these daily concerns fight like drag against flight to the point that we worry less and less about the future, or aviation's big picture--until, that is, we remember that whatever our role, we actually do have a place within that big picture.
Dave Wilkerson is a designated pilot examiner, writer/photographer, and historian. He has been a certificated flight instructor since 1981 with approximately 2,000 hours of dual instruction, and is a single- and multiengine commercial-rated pilot.
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