Two pilots are comparing notes about practice flights from their student days that took unexpected turns. Many years later, as they vividly relate what it took to resolve the unanticipated challenges, neither can recall exactly what was originally planned for those flight lessons. They only know that on the days in question, they learned more than they bargained for about becoming a pilot.
Any session of flight training provides two kinds of learning: the lesson you set out to work on, and the lesson that emerges from the day’s flying.
The first kind of learning is precisely parsed in your training syllabus, designed to get you through the flight test while building a basic foundation for your future flying. As for the other kind of learning, think of it as the type that builds your aviation street smarts, taking you out of the syllabus—typically with no forewarning—to handle a scenario that pushes the boundaries of your knowledge and experience.
Don’t pass off those unexpected occurrences as simple storytelling material and go on as if nothing had happened. The real world of aviation demands that you always be ready to throw out the script for a day’s flight—on short notice. Even when you are flying in the protective company of your flight instructor, such scenarios will present themselves.
As you progress through training, the CFI will gradually turn over more of the decision making to you. How you respond to these scenarios is one of the intangible elements of a pilot’s maturation process that leads to such happy moments as being authorized to fly your first solo—and, later, to take your practical test.
And, to divulge a secret of the flight instructor’s trade, a perfect response from you is not what the CFI is looking for. What’s desired is to see a strong indication that you rose to the challenge with confidence, demonstrated clear thinking, focused primarily on flying the aircraft first throughout the event—and learned something from it.
Here’s a fairly common example. A pilot is tidying up the aircraft after a local training session and is replaying a portion of the hour-long flight in his mind. The next time I have to go around while I am soloing, I won’t let it take me by surprise, he tells himself.
The go-around scenario wasn’t part of the lesson plan, but that didn’t make it any less of a lesson. Surprised by another aircraft taxiing onto the runway just as he was preparing to round out and flare, the student pilot performed a sloppy go-around, getting the checklist’s sequence of steps for the balked landing out of order. That, in turn, caused excessive loss of altitude, affected directional control, and caused a loss of visual contact with the aircraft below.
During the unfolding scenario, the student pilot was momentarily distracted as the question popped into his head, Am I at fault here, or is the other pilot? But that thought was irrelevant to safe operation and needed to be pushed out of mind immediately. One clear lesson here is that there are questions that must be answered right away, such as, “How am I going to avoid a collision?” and questions that must be set aside for later, including analyzing why the incursion happened and what could have been done to avoid it.
The experience also provided an insight at which all student pilots arrive, one way or another, as they train: It is one thing to perform a go-around on command when your flight instructor announces, “Airplane on the runway!” It’s another to make the decision unassisted and perform the delicate maneuver as prescribed—especially when complacency produced by the expectation of a nice landing has switched off your mental hazard alerts.
Be assured that long after a student pilot can no longer recall what specific maneuvers and skills were practiced that day, the go-around—and the ever-present possibility of having to perform another one—will remain etched vividly in memory during future landing approaches.
Unexpected lessons don’t have to be sudden and jarring, like that go-around, to imprint themselves on a pilot’s thinking from that day forward. A long spell of light-to-moderate, but unexpected, turbulence can bring on fatigue much sooner than a smoother flight would, and that fatigue can degrade a pilot’s performance. Strong headwinds and the prospect of arrival at the destination after dark (or with low fuel) can be a distraction, and undermine confidence.
A turn for the worse in the weather, in defiance of a carefully studied forecast, should never be simply dismissed as “just one of those things.” Review your planning, including studying any weather reports that you may be able to recover from the day’s historical weather data. Did you miss something on your preflight briefing?
How did the deteriorating conditions affect your flight? If, for instance, the weather problem you encountered was lower ceilings, did it hinder your ability to spot checkpoints, or place you uncomfortably close to obstructions or high terrain? Did a broken cloud deck at 4,000 feet cause you to ponder whether it would be better to descend into reduced visibility conditions beneath the cloud deck or fly above the clouds, risking getting caught “on top”? (Remember that the regulations require that a student pilot fly “with visual reference to the surface.”)
Did the unforecast adverse conditions cause you to consider diverting, or turning around? Was the experience so unnerving or distracting that—when the runway was finally sliding beneath your landing aircraft—you bounced the touchdown, or dropped it in from a few feet too high? That’s a common ending to such scenarios, a result of letting down your guard just a little too soon after the in-flight problem situation has been resolved. Now that the experience is behind you, what kind of report card would you give yourself for your analysis and responses to what you encountered?
Speaking of rough arrivals, a pilot recently emailed to describe an insight gained when an unexpected lesson presented itself during a VFR cross-country: “My setups at unfamiliar airports are not great, and I really dropped it in. Coming back, the landing was a good one. Funny how that works.”
That insight is sure to pay dividends on future flights, reminding the pilot to allow more time for flying proper entries to unfamiliar traffic patterns.
On any flight, it’s fine to think about the mission that was planned and grade yourself on its performance. Then be sure to ask yourself, “What else did I learn today?” /p>
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