Here in the United States, we are pie people. We even have a saying about it: "As American as apple pie." We serve pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, peach pie in the summertime, and chocolate pie at Christmas. In the aviation world, pilots are served up a unique variety of this classic dessert. It doesn’t matter whether you are a brand-new student or an experienced pilot with thousands of hours. At one point or another, the airplane serves us all up a very large slice of humble pie, reminding us once again that we may not be the sky kings we think we are.
I recently did some training to get a type rating in a Hawker 400 that flies for a local management company. I have plenty of jet time and airline experience, but I have been flight instructing in light general aviation aircraft for the past five years. I must admit that after being out of that fast-paced world for so long, the Beechjet gave me that old overwhelming feeling of drinking from a fire hose.
The training was tougher than I expected it to be, given my experience level. The instructor on the jet was a great teacher and did several things to make the process easier for me to get through. However, the whole experience was extremely humbling and reminded me once again of what it felt like to be a brand-new student pilot trying to learn a new skill set. Sometimes, as flight instructors, we forget what it’s like to be a student who is trying to process several things at once while also speaking a new language, broadcast over a radio for all to hear. It is truly a challenge, but there are several things instructors can do to help their students along.
To start with, always set achievable goals for your students and make sure they understand exactly what you expect. New students learning how to land need to know that a successful flight is one in which their landings continue to improve and gets them closer to their goal of solo. Your job, as the instructor, is not to lower your standards, but to understand that there are different requirements for each phase of training. Checkride standards of altitude and heading are not an appropriate goal for a new student and, in some cases, can be detrimental to confidence when students are expected to attain those rigorous levels too early in their training. Especially during and after the flight, try to maintain an overall positive attitude about the progress your student is making. Sometimes, in the interest of time, it is easy to get focused on the areas that need improvement. But it may be just as important for your students to understand the things they are doing well so they can approach the next lesson with confidence.
What do you do during the flight if you have the painful experience of watching your student struggle through a maneuver or procedure that he or she just cannot seem to master? There are several ways a patient-minded instructor can help. Again, this isn’t a matter of lowering your standards, but of simply showing kindness to a frustrated person who needs it, badly.
First of all, try the classic instructing method of “instructor tells/student does” in which you act as the voice in your student’s head by verbally talking him through the entire maneuver. For example, when I was trying to master the steep turn in the Hawker, the instructor told me what corrections to make as I was flying the maneuver, although he never touched the control wheel. As I was rolling into the turn, he was calling out, “Increase the back pressure here to five degrees pitch up. Now a little more bank. Coming up on the entry heading again. Lead the rollout.” Because he was acting as the brains of the operation, I was able to just let my hands do the work as we executed a near-perfect steep turn. After seeing for myself that I was capable, I tried it again with less input from him, but armed with the confidence I needed to perform my own steep turn to standards.
If this “instructor tells/student does” method still doesn’t achieve the desired results, it might be time to take a break and remind your student why he enjoys flying in the first place. Try flying him over an interesting landmark or taking him to see his house from the air. Sometimes all your student needs is a change of perspective to get him successfully moving forward in training again.
Remember, although it may seem like second nature to you now, learning to fly an airplane is no easy feat. When your students start to stumble and confidence fades, sometimes all they need is a patient instructor offering up a dollop of encouragement to go along with that humble pie.
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