Flight Training

Recreational Stepping Stones Continue Sporty’s Flight Training Success

December 23, 2013 by Scott Spangler

Four years ago Sporty’s President & CEO Michael Wolf took time at year’s end to compile a list of the developing trends in general aviation. I look forward to it each year because Sporty’s probably has more contact with the spectrum of aviators, from enthusiasts and new students to veteran pleasure and professional pilots, than any other entity. And it interacts with them not just as a source of pilot supplies, but also for flight training and avionics and maintenance services.

Half of this year’s 10 trends, writes Wolf, involve the iPad in some way. It’s a MFD for ADS-B In, it sends flight plans to Garmin’s D2 smart watch, it’s replacing paper in commercial and GA cockpits, and it’s changed the contents of a pilot’s flight bag, as well as the aviation apps that run on it. One trend on the list usually deals with Sporty’s Academy, which is dedicated to flight training.

Pretty much a success from its start in the late 1980s, 2013 was no different, Wolf reports, and the academy, which educates professional as well as pleasure pilots, has concluded its busiest year ever. He attributes part of this success to airline hiring, but most of the school’s continuing success stems from its structure that is built “on a series of stepping stones like the first solo and Recreational certificate, [which] leads to more engaged students and better pilots.” This year, “our dropout rate is approaching zero.”

Since the FAA introduced it in the 1990s, the recreational pilot certificate has been the keystone to success at Sporty’s Academy. While Sporty’s embraced it, and succeeded, with a few exceptions, general aviators and the flight schools panned it. There are many reasons why, but the fundamental reason was that is was different, and people, especially those who exist in a structured activity like aviation, don’t like change. And aviation has suffered because of it.

As we march another year forward in writing the history of powered flight, it is again my hope that aviators and educators will replace their fear and dislike of change with impartial pragmatism. It’s way of thinking where you measure something not on its differences but on its potential to do something better. And if it doesn’t work, stop doing it. And if it does, build on it, adapt it to your situation and circumstances. The effort might, like it has at Sporty’s Academy, support decades of success. — Scott Spangler, Editor

Technorati Tags: Flight Training,Sporty’s Academy,Recreational Pilot Certificate

New Rule ‘Advances’ Pilot Training Back to the Fundamentals of Flight

November 11, 2013 by Scott Spangler

Responding to the tragedy of Colgan Flight 3407, the FAA has issued a final rule that “is a significant advancement for aviation safety and U.S. pilot training,” says Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in the FAA news release.

Really?

To quote the FAA release, the new rules requires these stick-and-rudder skills: “ground and flight training that enables pilots to prevent and recover from aircraft stalls and upsets” and “expanded crosswind training, including training for wind gusts.”

The other requirements all have to do with paperwork, such as “tracking remedial training” and “more effective pilot monitoring,” which is important in assessing blame after unfortunate pilots have a problem related to their lack of current stick-and-rudder skills.

Can I really be so old that the skills my instructor reinforced with practice on almost every lesson—recovering from stalls and unusual attitudes—are now considered advanced training? And landing in a crosswind, at least at most of the airports I called home, was not a special skill. When I was flying in the Kansas City area, landing without a crosswind was the challenge.

Perhaps I am. I learned to fly in the last decade of aviation’s analog era. Back in the 1970s, headsets were the big thing. That was also when the pilot population started its decline, so industry started easing the requirements to make private pilot training less intimidating. Who remembers the heated debates on the need for spin training?

Friends, Forecasts & the Future of Aviation

September 3, 2013 by Scott Spangler

Most of my friends and acquaintances are, in some way or another, involved with aviation. Talking with them over the past months, the future of aviation seems to be the discourse destination of choice. On the whole, their outlook on aviation’s future isn’t good.

As might be expected, this consensus can lead to a semi-permanent state of depression. The best antidote I’ve so far found is Nate Silver’s excellent book, The Signal and The Noise: Why so many predictions fail—but some don’t. An infinitely complex subject, accuracy begins with the forecaster’s predictive personality, either a hedgehog or a fox.

These classifications were described by Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology and political science at UC-Berkeley who named them after the main characters in a story by Leo Tolstoy. To summarize their differences, the fox knows many little things from different sources, the hedgehog knows “one big thing.”

Most of my friends and acquaintances are, it seems, hedgehogs, that Silver accurately described as “Type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas.” A few, and I include myself in this category, are foxes, those who “believe in a plethora of little ideas and in taking a multitude of approaches toward a problem.”

All-in individuals, aviation’s hedgehogs predict doom for aviation’s future, especially GA, citing everything from the decades-long decline in the pilot population, the price of airplanes and fuel, and the time and effort it takes to become a pilot whether it is for pleasure or a profession. On these metrics, I agree that aviation will never return to its former glory of the 20th century, but the probability that it will cease to exist is unlikely.

Make & Read Pilot/IFR Training Comments

June 17, 2013 by Scott Spangler

With just 130 or so comments received by the May 24 deadline, I guess the FAA felt it didn’t have enough flight training comments on its Draft Airman Certification Standards that its Airman Testing Standards & Training Work Group created for the private pilot certificate and instrument rating.

If you care, you have until July 8 to review the standards and comment on them. And even if you’ve been flying for years, you should care because you’ll be sharing the sky with pilots trained to these standards. A nifty website lets you read and comment on Docket FAA-2013-0316.

An interesting aspect of this website is that you can read the 140 comments posted as of Saturday, June 15. This is more fun than Facebook! And it can be more beneficial because it seems that you can comment on the comments, which builds an argument for and against the proposals.

Ready access to the comments also enables flaming wars of words that serve no other purpose than polishing one’s favorite ax. In wandering through the comments, I was heartened to see that, so far, that aviation has not been poisoned, like our political discourse, with zero-sum attitudes.

Unprofessional Airmanship Redefined

May 6, 2013 by Robert Mark

Remember when we called those two Northwest Airlines pilots who missed Minneapolis a few years back unprofessional because they were playing on their laptops instead of flying? We poked fun at them of course and well, no one was hurt … except for the pride of these two supposed professional aviators. But maybe we should have been tougher.

We talk a lot about professionalism these days, mostly because us old guys think many of the younger folks coming up the line don’t understand the meaning of the word. Perhaps they don’t because we’ve never taken the time to explain it … literally. I guess most of us never thought we needed to, but now I’m convinced that there are pilots jumping into some pretty large airplanes that seem completely unaware of their role as professional aviators.

Case in point is the Air India A321 on a recent flight between Bangkok and Delhi in which the two pilots actually left the cockpit of the aircraft within moments of each other at FL330, leaving command of the airliner in the hands of two non-pilot flight attendants. The pilots were both out of the cockpit for almost 40 minutes before one of the young flight attendants turned off the autopilot inadvertently and sent the two licensed aviators scurrying back up front. The two pilots as well as the two flight attendants were later suspended from work for their actions. None of the passengers knew what had happened until they read it in the newspapers.

To call this act unsafe is utterly too simplistic.

Despite the fact that most aviation accidents today are caused by pilot error, we’ve apparently reached a new low in professional pilot stupidity. What could possibly possess two high-time pilots to think that getting up mid-flight and leaving the fate of the 166 aboard to the two female seat monitors who were not even pilots was OK? My guess is this was not the first stupid decision these two made and more importantly, professionalism has nothing to do with the size of the aircraft someone flies. [Read more…] about Unprofessional Airmanship Redefined

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