Instructor Report: Know Thyself

A few month ago, I was doing a pre-cross-country solophase check with an amiable young guy. I had asked him to get a complete preflight briefing and plan a flight to San Luis Obispo, a coastal airport about 45 minutes away. He came with paperwork in hand and a new FAR/AIM with pages tabbed with sticky notes.

He did an OK job on the oral. He miscalculated his compass heading, but only because his handwriting was hard to read and he got some numbers mixed up. He couldn’t tell me when the terminal aerodrome forecast (TAF) he was using expired and used the wrong data row in determining runway length required. We talked about the weather along his route and his personal minimums. The TAF suggested a 4,000-foot ceiling at his planned arrival time. He said his personal minimum for cross-country flight was a 5,000-foot ceiling and didn’t catch that, if the TAF was correct, he wouldn’t meet his own standard for the flight.

We spent about 90 minutes going over his planning. Then, I asked him, “Based on our conversation, do you feel comfortable with your flight planning, and do you feel prepared to make this flight without your instructor?”

“Yes sir,” he said. “Absolutely!”

The plan was to proceed on his planned route for one or two checkpoints, and then divert to a local airport. After that a little airwork, and then return to base. The ground call went fine, but he didn’t request flight following as I had asked him to do, and didn’t have his airport diagram on his lap.

Don't overestimate the skill of your student while downplaying your own expertise.The flight called for a left turnout, so when he asked tower for a straight-out departure I wondered what he was thinking. He didn’t have his nav log out, and had not programmed either the VOR or GPS. When we were four miles north I asked him what his course was to San Luis, and what his plan was to get there. He started searching for his nav log, finally reaching into his bag in the back seat to retrieve it. We shot through his planned altitude of 4,500 feet and leveled at just over 5,000 feet. When I asked him if he planned to fly all the way at that altitude he said yes.

The rest of flight went fairly well. He found his waypoints but forgot to time his legs. We diverted to Buttonwillow Airport, a skinny strip of pavement in the middle of nowhere. He had trouble finding the CTAF frequency on the chart and wasn’t sure how to tell if it was left traffic or right. Once all that got straightened out the landing was very good. The short-field takeoff also went well, as did the airwork on the way back. When we got back to the office, I asked him how he thought the flight went. “Really well,” he said. “I think I’m ready to go.”

We talked about the oral part of the phase check, and how he stumbled on some important subjects. I asked him why he didn’t program his GPS and he said he just forgot, he was nervous, and that he would have remembered at some point. Fair enough. I asked him about his personal minimums and how the forecast weather affected his go/no-go decision. He said he had never really had to use his minimums before and that he guessed he should have set his ceiling minimums lower so they fit better with the actual conditions that day. I asked him if his landlord let him set his own rent lower to fit better with his actual income, and he gave me a blank stare.

As we continued, I tried to focus on the positive. I never thought there was undue danger, and he handled the airplane well. I told him I thought he would be ready to go cross-country with just a little more practice with his instructor to fill in some gaps. He didn’t argue, but his body language screamed that he thought he was ready to go now.

I then told him about my largest concern. His self-assessment skills were not quite up to standard, and he needed to work on evaluating his performance more objectively as part of his overall risk management strategy. We discussed the importance of being able to evaluate our aviation skillsets as though we were an outside observer, without getting defensive or making excuses. Every pilot has strong and weak points, good and bad days, and being able to assess those differences before, during, and after each flight is crucial to our ability to learn and improve. I hoped I had gotten through to him. Time will tell.

Two or three months later, I was working with a new instrument student, a retired professional who had been flying for decades but was just now getting around to earning his instrument ticket. He came to each lesson fully prepared, notebook in hand and homework complete. Most days he had prepared a written list of questions, and our conversations during preflight briefings would always dig well below the surface.

Instrument training is tough duty, and each flight had things he did well and things that went not so well. In our postflight debriefs, he would dissect that day’s lesson in detail. He would write lengthy notes about everything he thought he’d done wrong, with a written corrective action plan. There was no ego involved in his evaluations; he knew it did no good to gloss over problem areas. Best to find the bugs, develop a plan to correct them, and move on. This guy was good.

It’s interesting that some people are so good at self-assessment and others are so poor. Two psychologists at Cornell University set out to test the hypothesis that poor performers will tend to overvalue their abilities, while high performers will undervalue their skills. They asked a bunch of college students to evaluate their ability to think logically, apply English grammar, assess their class ranking, and judge the quality of their sense of humor. Those test subjects who performed at a lower level rated their performance as significantly better than the test results indicated. This bias toward enhanced self-assessment was repeated in several studies with similar results.

While low-competence test subjects overvalued their abilities, high achievers did just the opposite and judged themselves to be less competent than the test results indicated. In addition, they tended to overestimate the performance of those who tested at a lower level. This finding that both high and low achievers misjudged their competence levels, in opposite directions, came to be known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, named after the researchers who conducted the studies.

So, what can pilots, flights students, and CFIs take away from this little glimpse into human nature? First, if you find yourself making significant mistakes in your flying but still consider yourself to be a good pilot, take a time out and ask yourself: Are you being truthful with yourself? It doesn’t matter if you think you’re good and safe. All that matters is how you perform compared to an objective standard. If you lose 300 feet in a steep turn, or consistently land on the left side of the runway, you need to accurately assess your skill level, develop a plan to improve, and then practice. Don’t judge yourself as a person, judge your performance. Get safer.

As a CFI, don’t fall into the trap of overestimating the skill of your student while downplaying your own expertise. Evaluate your students objectively against a list of performance criteria. Most training syllabi have performance parameters built in, so make that performance a criterion for moving on to the next phase of training. Saying you’ll fill in gaps in knowledge and performance later, while moving forward in the training program, sends an unspoken message that the standards don’t really matter.

My private pilot guy thought he was on the verge of pushing Sully out of the left seat, while my instrument student thought he needed to do much better. Both were wrong and, as it turns out, for entirely the same reason.

William Woodbury is a flight instructor and freelance writer living in Southern California.