I love the fishing channel, and not because it’s fun watching a grown man try to outwit a trout. It’s just exciting to see an angler detect a nibble on the line, then wait to set the hook and reel in a prize. Wise flight instructors often use a similar strategy of nibble, wait, and hook to help their students learn common myths and misconceptions about flying airplanes.
During a recent phase check, my student and I had just turned downwind at a towered airport. After rolling out, he glanced toward me (I don’t know why students do this while wearing headsets) and asked, “Did you get the airport winds?”
That was the nibble that got my attention. Why does he want to know the tower-reported winds? I turned toward him (yes, I had a headset on; don’t ask) and said, “Wind? Why do you want the wind the tower reports?” Sometimes a good follow-up question will help the student take a bigger bite on that hook.
He replied, “I want to know which way to crab on downwind and final.”
My little fishing expedition had helped reveal a possible flaw in his understanding of crosswind correction. Time for another question to clear up this misconception.
“OK, what do you do when landing at a nontowered airport without an AWOS/ASOS station or unicom operator?” I asked.
“Well, I just check for drift and make a correction,” he replied.
“And how often has that strategy failed you?”
“Never,” he confessed.
At this point I asked him why he thinks a wind report from the tower, AWOS/ASOS, or unicom accurately represents the wind direction and velocity at pattern altitude or in the runway’s touchdown zone. After all, few anemometers are located near the beginning of the runway. In fact, they’re occasionally located in the far corners of an airport, and most pilots try to avoid landing in the far corners of an airport.
My point wasn’t to embarrass my student. It was to do what good instructors do: make sure students know why they do what they do.
On another occasion, my commercial student turned from a left base onto final approach with the runway having a slight left crosswind. During the turn, the student mentioned he was high and would use a forward slip to lose altitude. Since I like to fish, I asked, “In what direction are you going to slip?”
He replied that he was going to continue the left turn past the runway centerline and point the nose into the left crosswind, followed by a forward slip to the right.
That’s a nibble, but to know how serious it was, I asked, “Why not just forward slip to the left while the nose points to the right of the centerline?” I waited patiently for his reply.
“Oh, we always want to slip with our nose into the wind since this results in the airplane descending faster.”
To sink the hook, I asked the following question.
“So, you’re saying that if you were at altitude in a 20-knot wind during a slipping turn [constant control deflection assumed here], your descent rate would increase when you turn into the wind and decrease when you turn with the wind, right?”
“Hmmm, I guess there’s no reason why the airplane would know which way the wind blows on it during the turn,” he replied.
I had just reeled in the Willy that everyone was trying to free.
The fact is that the airplane’s descent rate in a forward slip isn’t affected by wind. In this example, it’s affected by the degree to which the flight controls are deflected. As a practical matter, with this left crosswind, it’s more convenient to slip to the left since the left wing is already lowered for the left-sideslip crosswind correction.
So how do flight instructors fish? They listen for their students to reveal a misconception about how aviation works (the nibble). They wait to set the hook by asking one or more questions that expose the flaw in the student’s thinking. The instructor eventually reels in the prize as he or she corrects the student’s misunderstanding. Hmmm, I think I’ll call this fly fishing.
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