Making lemonade

You may find this hard to believe, but to a certificated flight instructor (CFI), some of the scariest students are those rare few who make no mistakes. Between good weather, luck, and talent, these students make great landings, never get off course, and always seem to have the answers. So, what's the problem? There's an old saying that summarizes the beneficial aspects of making mistakes and the learning experiences they represent: "If you've never been there before, how are you going to know how to find your way back, when you suddenly find yourself there?"

Don't go it alone You only have to be in aviation about five minutes to realize that it is fueled by gasoline, money, and hangar flying. Hangar-flying sessions are by far the cheapest way to gain experience and learn from mistakes with no real skin in the game. This is because when a bunch of pilots are sitting around talking, the conversation inevitably turns to, "Boy, did I do something dumb!" and the tales ramble on. Quite often, the storyteller is describing a flying episode that tested his skill and his luck and probably showed that neither his judgment nor his skill were up to the situation in question. Of course, you have to take every one of these bull sessions with a grain of salt, but they often involve a number of the airport's old hands who can usually be trusted to be factual. If they did something that saved their hide it is always worth handing down to others. Incidentally, to you hangar talkers out there (and you know who you are), understand that telling a story for self-aggrandizement is one thing, but when it includes some sort of make-believe heroics that the lower-time pilots around you are apt to take for gospel and try to emulate, you're possibly doing damage. Within aviation, the low-time pilots learn from the high-timers, so don't knowingly pass along a piece of flying technique where you've stretched the truth.

"I found that my students were scared to make mistakes in the airplane. They were afraid that if they made the slightest mistake we might suddenly crash and die. I found it very helpful to remind them that I was strapped into the same airplane they were and I would not let them do anything that was unsafe." - Leisha Bell, CFI/CFII

"It was my second to last flight before the multiengine checkride and I started to shut down the wrong engine. My instructor said he was waiting for that to happen to feel comfortable sending me for the checkride, because once I made that very stupid mistake, I would probably never do it again." - Brittney Miculka, CFI

Mistakes put us in uncharted territory and in the process of correcting them we learn lessons that can be taught no other way. Mistakes are a critical part of learning and the foundation of experience. Mistakes come in all different sizes and flavors ranging from the minor (turning the wrong way on the taxiway) to the major (continued visual flight into instrument meteorological conditions). Some do nothing more than embarrass us, while others have the potential for tragedy. During our training and beyond, we're going to make plenty of mistakes. It's important to not only recognize them, but do our best to learn everything we can from them.

Generally, when we do something clearly wrong that qualifies as a mistake, it is only after things are in the process of going wrong that we recognize our failing. At that point we should go into a very simple mental analysis that will both correct the situation and teach us what we can learn from what we did wrong. It's an easy program consisting of four basic questions:

• What was it supposed to be?
• How do I fix it?
• What did I do wrong?
• How do I avoid making the same mistake again?

Even though each of these steps sounds simple enough, in the heat of battle, it's sometimes difficult to sort them out.

Although the first two questions overlap, What was it supposed to be? has to be the first point because if we don't know what we were supposed to be doing - what the number was supposed to be, or where we were supposed to be going - how are we going to recognize that something is going wrong? In some situations, the mistake is easy to recognize because there is a known parameter attached to it. We know the approach speed is supposed to be 70 knots, but on short final we find ourselves whistling along at 85 knots. It only takes reading the airspeed indicator to see the mistake.

The less tangible mistakes - those that don't have a specific parameter attached to them - can be much more elusive and more difficult to immediately recognize. Once again, imagine yourself on short final, and this time the speed is right but as we flare, and the airplane starts to slow down, it suddenly dawns on us that we're much too high. Since most airplanes don't have curb feelers or radar altimeters, when picking an altitude at which to flare we have to use our experience and judgment, and it's easy to make the mistake of being too high (or too low).

So how do we know when we're making a mistake when there's no way to measure it? Unfortunately, there's no concise answer to recognizing a mistake in a nonquantifiable situation. With nothing to measure it against, the first hint we're making a mistake in most situations is an innate feeling that something's wrong. This may sound silly, but even the lowest-time student senses when things are not going right, although his lack of experience may let him wander deeper into the mistake before recognition sets in. As he gains experience and training, he'll spot a mistake sooner. Eventually he will be ableto see it coming and avoid it all together.

Revisiting the "I'm too fast" scenario, the fix is easy: Increase the backpressure just a tad, freeze the nose attitude and wait a few seconds, and recheck the airspeed after it has settled down. If it's not right, change the pressure/attitude again. It's an excellent example of correcting a mistake a little at a time so we don't overshoot our mark and wind up correcting our corrections.

In correcting an intangible mistake, where we don't have a number on a dial to tell us when we're right or wrong, everything is a little more difficult and will require some educated guesswork and more thinking. In the flare scenario, our understanding of basic aerodynamics will help us.

Let's analyze the situation: We're high and need to be lower. But we know from our ground school aerodynamics that an airplane needs angle of attack to fly, and the second we reduce that, the wing will have less lift and the airplane will come down. But in this case so close to the ground (assume we're 10 feet too high), putting the nose down will get us down too quickly. The rate of closure with the ground will end in a pretty good thump when we can't arrest the descent rate.

Another thing we know from ground school aerodynamics is that as we pull level and the airplane begins to slow down, the lift will also bleed off. Thus we'll start to slowly settle with little change in the airspeed. All we have to do is keep from increasing backpressure, which would burn off too much speed, and gravity will help us solve the problem. Then, when we're down about where we think we should be, we can resume raising the nose attitude to reduce speed and set up a nose-high touchdown attitude as we close on the runway.

The rules on how to fix a mistake have to be flexible because no two mistakes are the same, whether in the pattern or picking a wrong heading on a cross-country. However, the basic rule of correcting a mistake always starts with instituting corrective action the instant the mistake is noticed. If you're high on downwind, don't coast slowly downhill toward the point opposite the runway where you reduce the power. You'll have enough other stuff to correct when you get there without carrying this mistake with you. If a checkpoint isn't where you think it's supposed to be on a cross-country, immediately figure out what you have to do to make the next one right and change it. There's a big difference between correcting a small off-course error, and procrastinating and then having to correct being lost.

After we've corrected our mistake, we don't just file it and forget it. When things are going right, we should remember flights with pleasure, but that really doesn't teach us much. If something went wrong, there's always something to be learned and we need to focus on what caused it, how good a job we did in correcting it, and what we'd do different if we had it to do again.

It's one thing to know what we did wrong, but it's something entirely different to focus on how we can prevent the same thing from happening again. If we're fast on approach, we should monitor our nose attitude and airspeed more closely. If we're missing checkpoints, we should spend more time analyzing what the wind is doing to us or how closely we're holding a compass heading (a degree or two can make a big difference). If we consistently round out high, we need to check to see what references we're using or how closely we're monitoring the references we are using.

In every mistake (and there's an infinaite number), we need to analyze what skills need improving and, better yet, how much of the mistake was caused by faulty judgment as opposed to a faulty skill. Judgment is impossible to quantify and the most difficult to dissect, and even more difficult to teach. If we can look back at something and say, "Boy, that was stupid," then we should have learned something about our judgment and, at the very least, will be able to say, "and I'm not going to do that again."

Budd Davisson is an aviation writer/photographer and magazine editor. A CFI, he teaches about 30 hours a month in his Pitts S-2A Special. Visit his Web site.