I usually have students plan an hour flight that takes us about 1.2 where I fly the aircraft and they navigate for me. All they bring is the map, a pad to take notes, and if they like a camera to take pictures of some air checkpoints in the area. It lets the student focus on just one thing, learning how to really read that darn map.
Dead Reckoning and Solo time
- Thread starter CBpilot
- Start date
I usually have students plan an hour flight that takes us about 1.2 where I fly the aircraft and they navigate for me. All they bring is the map, a pad to take notes, and if they like a camera to take pictures of some air checkpoints in the area. It lets the student focus on just one thing, learning how to really read that darn map.
CoffeeIcePapers
Well-Hung Member
Seems like a waste of time. They need all the stick time they can get.
For what it's worth, the Army spends many, many hours doing exactly what shdw described during flight training.
tgrayson
New Member
I think it's an interesting idea. Ideally, you want to load the student just beyond his comfort level; either too little or too much load decreases learning. The first cross-country flight verges towards too much load, with the student flying the airplane, looking for traffic, making radio calls, listening to radio calls, looking for checkpoints, starting the clock, choosing headings, running checklists, opening a VFR flight plan, requesting flight following, etc. Best to focus on a small set of skills and then add more as proficiency increases.
Exactly - and that's why I did that sort of training for my students when I was flight instructing. Having the student fly the plane, do radios, AND learn the new skill of pilotage and dead reckoning seems a bit much the first time around.
The Army carries it further though - they had us navigate without flying for a lot of flights to gain a high level of proficiency in low-level nav. My IP would hover over a road intersection and point to a random point on the map in the Alabama woods 20 miles away and say "get me there." And when you got to where you thought the point was, he'd grumble and hover 50 feet more and say, "now we're here!"
This is where me and the rest of the flight world VASTLY disagree. I have, through all learning venues through my life, always broken things down and given things piece by pieces. What I have students do on the first cross country is be PIC, that is, not only fly the airplane but delegate tasks. I allow them to control the aircraft and give me things to do so they can stay in control.
Sure if I think they are just being lazy I give them more to do, but I don't give them the tasks they gave to me as that would be counter productive. Instead I tell them if I believe they are being lazy they will likely find themselves heavily loaded with other things, such as emergencies or distractions.
In traditional flight training I see instructor after instructor giving students everything they possibly can every lesson. That is not productive to how a person learns, in fact it is a large reason why students have little to no retention of what they learned when asked about it a couple months later. It is far more productive to allow dedicated focus on individual tasks which you then correlate to the big picture. Doing this allows you to see understanding and application before trying to just link everything together, you can't skip those steps it doesn't work.
Finally, when presenting single ideas (or more economically, 2-3 ideas per lesson, 20 minutes a piece) the student can then go home and do something I see little of, chair fly. That is, just sit in their chair at home during a commercial and think about what they did that day, run the procedures in their head. I recommend every student does this as it helps them imprint basic procedures in their brain so they don't have to waste brain power, or money, trying to recall basic procedure during a maneuver.
I do 2-3 1-1.5 hour flights like this and will be asking the new school I am working with to allow me to bring students up in the back seat, my old school didn't allow that. We don't go anywhere in these flights, just to navigate to select points/landmarks and one different, nearby and small airport each flight. Then they can get even more practice while we do normal flights around the area as passengers.