Have you seen the movie Miracle? It’s a true story about the U.S. Olympic hockey team (then composed amateurs) beating the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. In one of the film’s great scenes, the coach, Herb Brooks (played by Kurt Russell), drills his team over and over after their loss in an exhibition game. He calls “again” and makes them repeat a drill until he makes his point. My wife teases me and my students by bringing up this scene and saying “Flight training with Bob is a lot like that—‘again.’”
Coach Brooks was trying to make a point to his team by pushing them hard—almost to the breaking point. Although it made sense in that context, that’s not what works in flight training. What I am talking about is the idea of consistent repetition. At any level, a pilot needs to know what “normal” looks like. This frame of reference allows him to recognize when things aren’t working as planned or desired, allowing him to adjust or even to abandon a procedure if necessary. When dealing with a new student, there is what a CFI might consider to be the dullest maneuver in the book: rectangular courses. There you are at about 800 to 1,000 feet above the ground on a warm day going around some farmer’s cornfield, occasionally saying, “Let’s go over to that field,” so the student can practice entry to left or right patterns. This can be stultifying for the CFI, to say the least. In the meantime, the student is struggling to maintain the standards set forth by the practical test standards (or the higher ones set by a demanding instructor) in maintaining correct distance, airspeed, altitude, situational awareness, and so on. It is really very easy for the CFI to say “OK, close enough, let’s move on.”
But what if the student hasn’t performed to standard? What has the student learned at this point? First, she “learned” that the standards don’t really matter. Second, because this is a maneuver designed to teach the division of attention while in the traffic pattern, if she doesn’t get this fundamental skill nailed down, she will struggle needlessly in the pattern because we’ve added additional tasks—configuring for climbs, leveling off, configuring for landings, radio communications, checklist usage, etc. The poor student is left without the foundation of knowing how the picture should look before we increase workload.
We should not practice rectangular courses—or any other maneuver—until the airplane (or the student) runs out of gas. At some point there will be diminishing returns on a given day. What I am advocating is that a maneuver becomes familiar enough to the pilot that he can do it to standards with little or no input from you, the instructor. It might take a lesson or two (or three) before this occurs. This will, however, pay huge dividends down the road for both you and the student in time saved overall.
Another instance where this type of training will pay big dividends is when the student is learning to fly instruments. There has to be a set of appropriate responses at the decision point in each approach, for example. We talk about an instrument pilot having to be prepared to properly execute a missed approach. If we don’t practice that response over and over again, the instrument pilot may be left at a loss as to what to do—not a good place to be 200 feet above the ground on an ILS. The real challenge here is to make the scenario realistic, as well as to divorce the response from the specific airport. The drill really is to ensure that everything is briefed prior to flying the approach, and that the pilot is in the habit of having the next steps “queued up” if he can’t execute the landing.
Having trained what is normal over and over again gives the pilot the ability to recognize non-normal or diverging situations quickly. Going back to the example of the rectangular course, that student pilot is now in the pattern, ready to concentrate
on descending to and flaring above the runway. Let’s imagine that there’s a crosswind component at altitude that is blowing the airplane toward the runway during the downwind leg. If a pilot is not prepared, he won’t see that correction needs to be applied to parallel the runway.
Without this basis, the next step of correlating the fact that the base leg will likely take less time—or perhaps the pattern needs to be widened slightly—doesn’t occur to him. Instead, he may find himself with a very abbreviated base leg or flying a hairpin maneuver to line up with the runway. This, of course, could be corrected while flying in the pattern, but there are so many multiple tasks going on, it would be far more efficient to have that recognition built in. The same would also apply to the example of training instrument procedures. In all cases, it is invaluable for the pilot to know when things are deviating from the expected norm.
At the end of the day, then, trying to save the student a few dollars and the instructor some boredom may not really be in either’s best interest. Don’t look at the requirements as boxes to be checked off on a rote basis—look at them as opportunities to lay the foundation upon which to build polished, proficient pilots. The time spent early on will pay huge dividends in time and money saved for the student, not to mention far less frustration and a greater sense of satisfaction for both student and instructor.
Robert V. Meder is an active CFI with single- and multiengine instrument privileges and roughly 3,700 hours. He instructs in both the St. Louis and Omaha areas.
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Have you seen the movie Miracle? It’s a true story about the U.S. Olympic hockey team (then composed amateurs) beating the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. In one of the film’s great scenes, the coach, Herb Brooks (played by Kurt Russell), drills his team over and over after their loss in an exhibition game. He calls “again” and makes them repeat a drill until he makes his point. My wife teases me and my students by bringing up this scene and saying “Flight training with Bob is a lot like that—‘again.’”
Coach Brooks was trying to make a point to his team by pushing them hard—almost to the breaking point. Although it made sense in that context, that’s not what works in flight training. What I am talking about is the idea of consistent repetition. At any level, a pilot needs to know what “normal” looks like. This frame of reference allows him to recognize when things aren’t working as planned or desired, allowing him to adjust or even to abandon a procedure if necessary. When dealing with a new student, there is what a CFI might consider to be the dullest maneuver in the book: rectangular courses. There you are at about 800 to 1,000 feet above the ground on a warm day going around some farmer’s cornfield, occasionally saying, “Let’s go over to that field,” so the student can practice entry to left or right patterns. This can be stultifying for the CFI, to say the least. In the meantime, the student is struggling to maintain the standards set forth by the practical test standards (or the higher ones set by a demanding instructor) in maintaining correct distance, airspeed, altitude, situational awareness, and so on. It is really very easy for the CFI to say “OK, close enough, let’s move on.”
But what if the student hasn’t performed to standard? What has the student learned at this point? First, she “learned” that the standards don’t really matter. Second, because this is a maneuver designed to teach the division of attention while in the traffic pattern, if she doesn’t get this fundamental skill nailed down, she will struggle needlessly in the pattern because we’ve added additional tasks—configuring for climbs, leveling off, configuring for landings, radio communications, checklist usage, etc. The poor student is left without the foundation of knowing how the picture should look before we increase workload.
We should not practice rectangular courses—or any other maneuver—until the airplane (or the student) runs out of gas. At some point there will be diminishing returns on a given day. What I am advocating is that a maneuver becomes familiar enough to the pilot that he can do it to standards with little or no input from you, the instructor. It might take a lesson or two (or three) before this occurs. This will, however, pay huge dividends down the road for both you and the student in time saved overall.
Another instance where this type of training will pay big dividends is when the student is learning to fly instruments. There has to be a set of appropriate responses at the decision point in each approach, for example. We talk about an instrument pilot having to be prepared to properly execute a missed approach. If we don’t practice that response over and over again, the instrument pilot may be left at a loss as to what to do—not a good place to be 200 feet above the ground on an ILS. The real challenge here is to make the scenario realistic, as well as to divorce the response from the specific airport. The drill really is to ensure that everything is briefed prior to flying the approach, and that the pilot is in the habit of having the next steps “queued up” if he can’t execute the landing.
Having trained what is normal over and over again gives the pilot the ability to recognize non-normal or diverging situations quickly. Going back to the example of the rectangular course, that student pilot is now in the pattern, ready to concentrate
on descending to and flaring above the runway. Let’s imagine that there’s a crosswind component at altitude that is blowing the airplane toward the runway during the downwind leg. If a pilot is not prepared, he won’t see that correction needs to be applied to parallel the runway.
Without this basis, the next step of correlating the fact that the base leg will likely take less time—or perhaps the pattern needs to be widened slightly—doesn’t occur to him. Instead, he may find himself with a very abbreviated base leg or flying a hairpin maneuver to line up with the runway. This, of course, could be corrected while flying in the pattern, but there are so many multiple tasks going on, it would be far more efficient to have that recognition built in. The same would also apply to the example of training instrument procedures. In all cases, it is invaluable for the pilot to know when things are deviating from the expected norm.
At the end of the day, then, trying to save the student a few dollars and the instructor some boredom may not really be in either’s best interest. Don’t look at the requirements as boxes to be checked off on a rote basis—look at them as opportunities to lay the foundation upon which to build polished, proficient pilots. The time spent early on will pay huge dividends in time and money saved for the student, not to mention far less frustration and a greater sense of satisfaction for both student and instructor.
Robert V. Meder is an active CFI with single- and multiengine instrument privileges and roughly 3,700 hours. He instructs in both the St. Louis and Omaha areas.
Related Articles