Flight Training

Aviation Anniversaries and Complacency

May 20, 2019 by Scott Spangler

Trying to be a good father, I spent a rainy weekend making a recycling run though boxes that have lived unopened for more than a decade in the closet of the spare bedroom. Accepting that my expiration date, while unknown, is growing ever closer, I didn’t want to burden my boys with this task should my last day arrive sooner rather than later. In the process, I found this, the inaugural issue of Flight Training, June 1989, the aviation anniversary of a transition in my journalism career.

Slowly turning the pages I had not looked at or thought about for maybe 29 years recollected not only memories of the good people who brought this publication to life, but the emotions that filled me with life as we worked to this end. Like courses of bricks laid on a foundation of unquenchable anticipation were cyclic variations of confidence, ability, and knowledge. Determination was their mortar. United, they presented a challenge I was eager to meet every day.

It’s been awhile since I’ve felt that way. Why was that? The determination of my mortar must be unimpaired because I’m commencing my fourth decade in the field. But my emotional bricks are not as vibrant or clearly defined as they were when the inaugural issue came off the presses. Is the passage of time since my aviation anniversary the efflorescence that has muted them? Might complacency be an emotional efflorescence?

Unchecked efflorescence weakens the structural integrity of the integrated bricks and mortar. Complacency acts similarly on the integrity of our integrated emotions, knowledge, and skills. Time is an insidious process. It can build experience and breed complacency, and I wondered if the former is my delusional assessment of the latter?

Might reasoned anxiety be the defining distinction between experience and complacency? When I made my solo flight on March 27, 1976, this member of the anxiety clan was my unseen passenger. This uneasy concern about the contingencies of flight has been with me on every flight since. And the more I learned, the more experience is gained, the more thoroughly I pursued its antidote, preflight research, granular planning, and recurrent training and periodic assessment of my knowledge and skills.

Clearly, reasoned anxiety is a self-imposed emotion, but recalling and building on the feeling of my solo flight (and instrument rating) has (so far) kept me and my passengers safe and sound. And preparing for the contingencies of every flight is a large part of what makes flying fun for me. As a bonus, perusing the knowledge and experience needed to compound the antidote to my reasoned anxiety recalls the people and situations that made them possible. Certainly the same process will work with the my terrestrial life as well. — Scott Spangler, Editor

An Introductory Flight of Frustration

September 10, 2018 by Scott Spangler

Following Santa’s directions, for Christmas my oldest son’s wife got him an introductory flight lesson. I can’t remember any gift in the preceding years that left him so excited. An ICU nurse living in the metropolitan Kansas City, it took awhile for the weather to align with his work and family schedules (that happens when you have four kids). But he was patient, and his eager anticipation never dimmed, until he actually made the flight.

On his way home from the airport he called in a state of agitated consternation. To summarize our hour long conversation, the intro lesson was much less than he anticipated, and he pelted me with a series of questions whose common denominator was, “Was I expecting too much?” As he stepped through the lesson, if you could call it that, the answer to each question was no. What Santa brought you was not an introductory flight lesson but an hour of flight time for a safety pilot posing as a CFI.

My son described him as a “professor,” of what he didn’t know or say. He was “older than me, but not as old as you, Pops,” which put him somewhere between 31 and 64. And there was very little conversation before the flight. He didn’t ask why my son wanted to become a pilot and how he hoped to use this precious, hard-earned skill once he’d earned the certificate. Nor was there any preflight discussion of what they would do during the lesson. “He checked the oil and said, “Let’s go flying.'” said my son.

Learning to Fly and the Convenience Culture

February 26, 2018 by Scott Spangler

“Convenience,” wrote Tim Wu in The Tyranny of Convenience, “more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks—has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.” From a passenger’s perspective, aviation is all about convenience, especially when compared to long distance journeys on foot or by school bus. But learning to fly, becoming a pilot, is anything but convenient.

As Wu suggested, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it gives new context to an individual’s aspiration of pilothood.

Those who have seen their training through to certification know that learning to fly is inconvenient. It demands a serious commitment and investment of time and money. To attract more newcomers, many in aviation have endeavored to make the process less arduous.

When it comes to manned flight, this is probably a self-defeating effort. “Convenience,” wrote Wu, “has the ability to make other options unthinkable.” Nothing a flight school does will equal another more convenient aviation experience that is now enjoying robust growth: drones.

Yes, I can now hear you thinking, but flying an airplane and flying a drone are not equal. And I would not argue with you. But which pursuit is more convenient? A good preflight inspection often last longer than a drone’s battery, but that seems a perfect match for today’s average attention span.

Before you answer this, consider all of the conveniences you have accumulated over the years and decades to make your life “easier” and “more fulfilled.” And be honest, like Wu: “Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my own coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best.”

But there is a dark side to convenience, Wu writes. “With its promise of smoother, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sorts of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way enslave us.”

Pursuing inconvenience at every turn to give life meaning would just be silly. Washing clothes by beating them on a rock down by the river would be more meaning than any one life would deserve, especially during a Wisconsin winter.

Our culture of convenience “fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience,” Wu said. “Convenience is all destination and no journey.” For those looking for a rewarding journey that guarantees the struggles and challenges that give meaning to life, learning to fly is perfect.

Accepting this might be an effective marketing challenge for those seeking aviation newcomers. Make that newcomers who want to fly for fun. Those seeking a flying career are driven by other motivations. Perhaps our predecessors, who described flying for fun in post-World War II America as a hobby, were onto something.

“Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such,” Wu said. “As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices” We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions.” Perhaps you yourself have used one of these words to explain why you fly.

Investing the time and money in learning to fly is rarely discussed with newcomers beyond the transportive convenience it provides once achieved. Wu wasn’t talking about flying, but he could have been. “Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.”

Or above it. Rather than promoting the future convenience of learning to fly, why not focus on “the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest.”

Couch this outreaching challenge in a way that will tickle the interest of people who want to stand apart, to be noticed (and that includes just about everyone in the realm of selfie social media). Learning to fly is, perhaps, the north star in “the constellation of inconvenient choices [that] may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.”

It is certainly worth considering because those who fly for fun, for recreation, are the the economic foundation of general aviation, just as the middle class is for the American economy. Adapting the marketing messages to keep pace with the cultural changes and interests is essential for its survival, and one message does not interest all comers. — Scott Spangler, Editor

Redbird Migration: Technology as Teacher

November 6, 2017 by Scott Spangler

Deciding which breakout sessions was a vexing challenge at the Redbird Migration Flight Training Symposium held at the EAA Aviation Center in Oshkosh between October 10 and 18. Participants could pick six of 17 breakout sessions, with only four repeats: Redbird R&D; ATDs: FAA approval, Certification & Regs; Best Practices for Teaching in a Redbird; and Bringing Redbird GIFT into Your Flight School.

GIFT—Guided Independent Flight Training—best articulated the sessions’ common denominator, technology as teacher. Learning to fly through self-study in a simulator is an interesting concept with a number of benefits. First, with an insufficient number of CFIs interested in exercising their teaching certificates, it allows one who teaches to supervise the education of more students. More importantly, it introduces more consistency in the presentation, practice, and evaluation of the of maneuvers GIFT teaches.

Pilot proficiency is the next step, and expanding the efforts and success of EAA AirVenture’s Pilot Proficiency Center is an ongoing goal. Proficiency is an ongoing challenge for pilots who fly 50 hours (or less) each year for their own pleasure. Working with an instructor in a sim, pilots chose from a wide selection of VFR and IFR scenarios. Few will disagree that the sim is a better—and more affordable—classroom than an airplane. In addition, like GIFT, each scenario provides consistency that levels the teaching field.

Everyone agreed that increasing the benefit of this pilot resource depends on access and frequency. Billy Winburn of Community Aviation and Charlie Gregoire of Redbird Flight discussed ways sim-equipped flight schools could offer the scenarios at Pilot Proficiency Center on a Local Level.

A secondary benefit of all the simulator-based efforts was the growing ability to document a pilot’s progress from student to certificate to sustained proficiency. This was one of the topics Redbird’s Jerry Gregoire discussed at the Redbird R&D session. The proactive and interactive feedback pro and con about possible systems and their enhancements was an unexpected example of a diverse group working toward a common goal.

But maybe it was not that surprising, given the cautionary words of Bill Ayer, the retired pilot, chairman, president, and CEO of Alaska Airlines and the Alaska Air Group, one of the Migration’s featured speakers. Asking for a show of hands of those who measure and track their student completions, an isolated and lonely handful of arms reached to the homebuilt airplanes suspended above them.

Therein lies one reason why only a small, guessed-at percentage of students conclude their training with a successful checkride. Recounting the challenges he addressed in revitalizing Alaska Airlines, Ayer made it clear that “what you measure gets done.”

Indeed. Imagine what the population of active pilots would number if just half of the students over the past three decades had realized their dreams of becoming a pilot. If the combination of dedication, innovation, and integration of practical technology glimpsed at the Redbird Migration spreads to just half of the nation’s flight schools, that outcome is entirely possible. — Scott Spangler, Editor

The Few. The Proud. The New Student Pilots

February 27, 2017 by Scott Spangler

On the road to our favorite brewpub for date night I noticed a new billboard for the U.S. Marine Corps: “We don’t accept applications. Only commitments.” The smallest member of America’s armed forces, it meets its recruitment goals by challenging volunteers to meet the Corps’ uncompromising standards. In other words: Not everyone can be a Marine. Becoming one is not easy. Do you have what it takes? Can you sustain your commitment when the rigorous training seems beyond your capabilities? Reflecting on my experience with the Corps during my naval service and after it, the Marines steadfast challenge to meet its standards might work equally well in recruiting new student pilots.

As the declining trend of student pilot starts suggests, and the roughly 80 percent who decide to pursue a less challenging activity before they solo or earn a certificate confirms, becoming a pilot is not for everyone. History suggests that making the training easier by eliminating its more challenging aspects—spin training and the recent amendment of how to teach slow flight come to mind—perhaps taking a lesson from the Marines will reduce the number who quit before certification. And in the process it might improve efforts to reduce accidents resulting from loss of control.

Posing this challenge will affect students and their instructors because the latter will have to change the way they teach.

Teaching maneuvers separately and with a rote by-the-numbers setup and recovery does not prepare students for real world situations. There are certainly many ways to accomplish this, and I had the good fortune to fly with teachers who employed several of them. One of the most effective was to discuss a situation on the ground, say a spin resulting from an uncoordinated turn from base to final, and then to make the point in the airplane. What made it effective was the true point of the teacher’s demonstration.

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