Right Seat: It’s not complex

Now with an FAA rule change, the focus will be on setting up flight plans, managing autopilot modes, and watching your position on a moving map, none of which has the satisfying whine of a gear motor. Since flight schools no longer need to provide these icons of another age, the market for retractables from the 1970s will likely go belly up, as well.

But let’s not get too sentimental here. The FAA—by eliminating the requirement that a commercial pilot applicant obtain 10 hours in a complex airplane, and that both commercial pilots and flight instructors take the practical test in one—is simply doing its job and adapting to a changing world. Retractable-gear trainers are produced at a yearly rate in the single digits, which makes what’s available for training always old and usually beat up. Technically advanced aircraft—now an alternative to the 10-hour complex requirement—must have an electronic primary and multifunction display, an autopilot, and a GPS navigator. In other words, most of what comes new from manufacturers today, and has for the past decade.

From one perspective, it would be tempting to say, as our writer David Jack Kenny has, that safety might be reduced by removing the requirement for complex flight experience (see “It’s Complicated,” p. 52). If that’s all the regulation change were doing I might agree. But that argument misses the broader context, which is that students will instead be receiving 10 hours of instruction in an airplane with advanced avionics and navigation capabilities. Instead of being forced to drill landing gear muscle memory, valuable training time will be spent with advanced cockpit management—a much more useful skill.

My most memorable complex airplane checkout was at a flight school that was recovering from a gear-up landing. In response, the school had changed the procedure for complex checkouts to require that every pilot go around the pattern 10 times, repeating the same callouts and procedures each time. Forget the script on lap nine and you had to start over. Is it any surprise that I don’t remember what the procedures or callouts were? It’s like cramming for a spelling test and forgetting how to spell Mississippi the day after. It would be difficult to explain how that experience was more useful to my everyday flying than programming a GPS or operating an autopilot would have been.

By enabling commercial pilot applicants to fly more real-world scenarios, the FAA—thanks to some forward thinking, and input from AOPA and others—nailed this change. We fly in a modern era with modern avionics that require skills that go beyond the basics of airmanship. Gear-up landings may result in insurance claims, but they don’t often produce injuries. Mismanage avionics and the results won’t be as pretty. Dozens of serious accidents can be attributed to autopilot mismanagement, mode confusion, and navigation errors. Focusing on these
higher-order skills will make us safer, make training more accessible, and help bring us all into the modern age.

This change was one of about a half dozen the FAA instituted with its recent Part 61 changes (see “Good News for Pilots,” p. 26). From being able to count simulator time toward instrument currency for the full six-month period to giving sport pilots the chance to apply their training with a sport pilot instructor for a future certificate or rating, the FAA has eased the burden on pilots while keeping safety at a similarly high level.

You can have your gear lever, controllable-pitch propeller, and flaps. Flight training is slowly inching its way into this century, and we should all be thankful for that.