Fligth training scenarios

nicepilot

nicepilot

New Member
Hello to all seasoned CFI's!

I'm a newly certified CFI-I and recently started at my first instructor job in a Part 61 flight school. I'm curious to hear what kind of training scenarios you use on the regular basis, and how do you create new scenarios. Also, in overall, what do you think about scenario based training?

Thanks for your insight in advance!
 
Congratulations!

You can find resources on SBT via the FAA web site: http://www.faa.gov/training_testing/training/fits/

There, you will find examples, methodology, and the philosophy behind SBT and FITS. There are also a few books you can obtain such as "Train Like You Fly" and "21st Century Flight Training" to get you going.

Thus far, SBT sounds good on paper. It is time consuming if you want to develop your own scenarios and integrated it into a comprehensive training plan/syllabus. In application, plan on longer pre/post flight briefings. Since Learner Based Grading is an integral part of the whole idea of SBT, you have to have students who understand that unless they study and stay on top of their flight training, it's not going to work. SBT may also increase the cost of flight training since the idea involves getting your students to fly mostly cross-country flights. Depending on how far the next few airports are around your base, this could add to the cost significantly. On the flip, you as the CFI must have an excellent understanding of SBT, its core knowledge base, and how to teach it so that the students can apply it in their own flying.

In theory (and in early studies), a properly trained student under SBT will be more competent and skilled compared to their maneuvers-based-trained counterpart. To be effective, you need to understand your student's needs, motivation, and goals (sound familiar? Ref: FOI). Your scenarios will be most beneficial to said students if you have this understanding. Think back to your own flying and what scenarios you encountered that taught you valuable lessons. See if they can be developed into scenarios.

Cessna I believe, have developed SBT for their SkyCatcher. I believe King Schools may also have SBT products available.

I hope this helps.
 
Flying Ninja said:
Cessna I believe, have developed SBT for their SkyCatcher.
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They have. SBT and learner centered grading are customer service oriented tactics to avoid discouraging students. Learner based grading is great in that the student must understand the objective and purpose for each maneuver, but at the end of the day, they still need to fly to PTS for the ride. A lot of time is spent on decision making skills and judgment, and unfortunately, it does encourage a lot of time wasted on going from place to place while the student sits idle in cruise. Fortunately, a healthy balance between skills based and scenario based training is still possible within the Cessna curriculum. Frankly, I think the whole concept is just the pendulum swinging entirely too far away from "the old" endless practice area maneuvering.

To the OP, just give it time. It's going to be awkward at first no matter what you choose do... just be genuine with your students and your groove will come.
 
Oh man so many.

My favorite was having my student start on a cross country she'd planned, then getting a pre-arranged radio call from another instructor who pretended to be stuck at another airport with a flat tire, and could we please divert and give them a ride back? She bought it hook, line and sinker. It was great.

Then there are the unintentional ones, like a student having to use lost procedures 15 miles outside the practice area after a similar x-c start/diversion. This individual was working on their commercial multi. *facepalm*.
 
PFGiardino said:
They have. SBT and learner centered grading are customer service oriented tactics to avoid discouraging students. Learner based grading is great in that the student must understand the objective and purpose for each maneuver, but at the end of the day, they still need to fly to PTS for the ride. A lot of time is spent on decision making skills and judgment, and unfortunately, it does encourage a lot of time wasted on going from place to place while the student sits idle in cruise. Fortunately, a healthy balance between skills based and scenario based training is still possible within the Cessna curriculum. Frankly, I think the whole concept is just the pendulum swinging entirely too far away from "the old" endless practice area maneuvering.

To the OP, just give it time. It's going to be awkward at first no matter what you choose do... just be genuine with your students and your groove will come.
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We started the new online Cessna kit at our school and did away with it after a few months. They tried to fix what wasn't broken and overcomplicated it. Aside from the gobs of paperwork it added, a lot of the scenarios were kind of useless and time consuming. I would rather teach maneuvers and put the student in scenarios myself both on the ground and in the air.
 
nicepilot said:
I'm a newly certified CFI-I and recently started at my first instructor job in a Part 61 flight school. I'm curious to hear what kind of training scenarios you use on the regular basis
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Too many to count. Usually they involve situations the pilot might encounter with passengers, weather, and/or inoperative equipment. One of the key elements of a good scenario is that there is no "right" answer. Rather, it's a series of events that force the pilot to make decisions.

For example:

You and your friend have expensive tickets to a concert in Kansas City (about 150 miles away from my home airport). The weather is overcast at 1800. Your COM2 radio is inop. You'll be flying down in the day and returning late at night. Why would or wouldn't you make this trip?

You're on a cross country flight at dusk, building time for your instrument rating, about 75 miles away from your home base, when thunderstorms start developing between your present position and home airport. You have to be at work at 8 a.m. the next morning and your wife always gives you a hard time about how "impractical" flying is. What are your options? Do you divert. Spend the night in another town? Have somebody drive out and pick you up? Wait out the storms and fly home late at night? What are the services like late at night at the airport you're thinking of diverting to? How late is the FBO open?

On a local training flight, reduce the power to a level that will certainly not sustain level flight, but isn't a complete failure, either. See how do they handle it. Do they try to make it home? Put it down in a field underneath them?

nicepilot said:
...and how do you create new scenarios.
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I feed off my own experiences as an instructor, ferry pilot, jump pilot, and listener of other pilots' stories. I tell a lot of, "There I was..." stories, then I let the client finish the scenario. Private pilot trainees end up dealing with crosswinds, navigating and diverting via pilotage at 500 AGL on XCs because "the clouds sure are getting low," explaining to "their friend" (me) why buzzing that house would be a bad idea, etc.

Instrument pilots end up flying more than just the required single 250 nm XC under IFR. We go in to all types of airports, copy clearances in every way imaginable, etc.

Commercial pilots have to decide if they'll ferry or test fly a plane with certain equipment inoperative.

CFI applicants get to hear about all the crazy scenarios other people have put me in and how I've gotten out of them. I give a lot of, "Client XYZ has been doing this, this, and this...are they safe to solo? How do you determine if you're able to sign a customer off for a flight review? What do you do if a pilot refuses to do stalls during a flight review?"

These are all the types of things I've personally experienced.

nicepilot said:
Also, in overall, what do you think about scenario based training?
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Greatest thing since sliced bread. It's the only way to train that effectively develops a pilot's *decision making* skills. Any monkey can takeoff and land. The reason most pilots get into trouble is because they didn't recognize and prevent poor decisions. Scenario based training addresses these "softer" skills needed to be a safe pilot.

One of the tough things, that you're probably already seeing, is a freshly minted instructor doesn't have much experience to draw from when they start teaching. If you're coming out of a big flight academy, the trickiest thing you might have personally experienced was, "One time my instructor and I flew into Class B airspace."

That's fine. Talk to the old farts around the airport and find out what tough spots they've been in, then imagine some ways to prevent your clients from putting themselves in the same spot in the future. Before long you'll have plenty of stories yourself.

Have fun teaching. Just the fact that you bothered to ask about this topic tells me you'll be a darn good instructor!
 
On divert scenarios for fixed-wing, I give guys small uncontrolled airport options, generally with multiple runways. The I ask them based on winds which runway they'd want and why? The runway that the wind favors though, while good in length and meets landing data.....it doesn't have the weight bearing capacity for our aircraft, but the cross runway does. They don't intially think of that, and gets into a good discussion into the IFR Supplement or AF/D and considerations of some of the nuances that most pilots either don't know is there, don't notice them when looking up an airport (assuming they do), or don't think about. For helicopter I can use the same scenario, but if the runway or ramp can't hold us and there's no designated helipad, then I try to get guys to think about landing in the dirt or grass instead.
 
Thank you so much for the responses! I was trained 'traditional' way and the SBT syllabi that I've checked out so far seem quite complicated to implement. Also, I hear more people questioning the benefit of SBT. In the newest Flight Training magazine, Rod Machado asks the same question I've been wondering: "I've never heard anyone say that scenario-based flight training shortens time in training or reduces the cost. The FAA's scenario training brochure actually discourages taking students to the practice area to teach them the fundamental skills of flight. Instead, it encourages you to take your students on simulated cross-country flights prior to solo and teach them the fundamental flight maneuvers along the way. Doesn't that seem like more of a mega-distraction than an aid to learning?" Yet I see the benefit of SBT, and would like to incorporate it to my instruction at least some degree. I guess I have to start somewhere, and as soon as I get more experience under my belt, I could try to make it more complex.
 
Think of scenarios that you have been put into. Also read through accident data bases to see the types of things that have gotten people in trouble and try to put your students in those situations.
I'm not sure what Machado has been drinking lately. I don't think the goal of the alphabet soup groups and CFIs should be to turn out more pilots, but to turn out more safer pilots. It's almost as if he advocates just teaching the checkride. His idea of making CFIs out of newly minted pilots is insane- so we want the blind leading the blind??? Yes, the days of simple aircraft with no avionics was great and it made teaching easy. Those days are over, however. You can train a pilot in a very simple aircraft, but there is no restriction on a new private pilot once you are finished. There is nothing restricting them from busy airports. Or if they trained at a busy airport there is no restriction against non-towered airports. Pilots need to learn stick and rudder skills, but normally what kills pilots is not just the stick and rudder skills, but situations that they have not been trained for. Trying to teach pilots decision making at every level- private, commercial, ATP- is just as important as the stick and rudder skills. The best way to do this is to put the pilot in a situation where they actually have to make a decision with you there to keep them safe. Just as you sometimes let the student carry a power on stall into an incipient spin to see how they will handle it, sometimes you need to let them flounder for a while in scenarios in order to learn from them. "... more like mega-distractions than an aid to learning?" Flying is full of "mega-distractions", it is a part of flying and should be part of the training.
 
I'm glad youre thinking ahead, but my opinion is tl teach for a hundred hours then start thinking about sbt. In that time youll learn what it is to teach and by then you should have a good picture of the useful sbt scenarios and what is garbage
 
Simulators are a great tool for scenario based training. I would use it extensively during instrument training and pop all kinds of systems failures, atc issues, navigation issues, etc. I think it really teaches them a lot. With using a sim it is lower cost and once they spiral the scenario beyond the point of control, there's the pause button. Then we go over the cliched links in the chain that ultimately made for a very unpleasant day. Certainly building scenarios based on your own experiences is vital and if you're new then don't worry students will do things to catch you off guard and you'll build your stories. But for right now I agree with Moxie just worry about getting the basics of providing proper, efficient training down first and sbt techniques will come in time. You really do learn a ton in that first 100hr dual given.
 
One of the most useful scenarios I've found are the type the Roger mentioned, the unintentional type. Let the student make a mistake and have them get themselves out of it, whether it is botched descent planning, onset of poor weather, etc. I've been teaching a lot of advanced students lately and the one thin I notice is really lacking is the ability for the student to think for themselves. With simulated abnormal procedures or emergencies, don't stop the scenario at the completion of the checklist. Have the student continue after the checklist whether it results in a diversion, precautionary landing, putting it in a field, etc. Too often the student has difficulty determining what course of action to take once the checklist is complete. Another thing I do is limit the assistance I give a student during the scenario. I suddenly become the dumbest person in the plane when the scenario starts.

Good luck!
 
ScoutFlyer said:
One of the most useful scenarios I've found are the type the Roger mentioned, the unintentional type. Let the student make a mistake and have them get themselves out of it, whether it is botched descent planning, onset of poor weather, etc. I've been teaching a lot of advanced students lately and the one thin I notice is really lacking is the ability for the student to think for themselves. With simulated abnormal procedures or emergencies, don't stop the scenario at the completion of the checklist. Have the student continue after the checklist whether it results in a diversion, precautionary landing, putting it in a field, etc. Too often the student has difficulty determining what course of action to take once the checklist is complete. Another thing I do is limit the assistance I give a student during the scenario. I suddenly become the dumbest person in the plane when the scenario starts.

Good luck!
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That's what I like to do. Look out the window. When they ask me a question I'll give them the "UN Salute". :dunno:
 
nicepilot said:
Hello to all seasoned CFI's!

I'm a newly certified CFI-I and recently started at my first instructor job in a Part 61 flight school. I'm curious to hear what kind of training scenarios you use on the regular basis, and how do you create new scenarios. Also, in overall, what do you think about scenario based training?

Thanks for your insight in advance!
Click to expand...


My favorite scenario (on the instrument side of training) involves going up in actual and flying in the system. A lot of schools simulate this scenario, but there are many that don't actually go out and do it. Crazy, isn't it? :insane:

Went up with an instrument student of mine in solid IMC the other day. Before this flight and throughout our many lessons so far I had preached to him about spatial disorientation. He had understood what I was telling him, but seeing him get slightly disoriented while we were in the clouds really made him "get" it. Know what I'm sayin'? There's no substitute for the real thing.
 
Scenario Based Training

Hi all, I am a DPE and a cfi as well as other things (just ask my exes)! I am curious, I am doing a lot of secenario based testing when I give a checkride, and am not yet really seeing correlation happening. The feds are instisting that we do scenario based tests, and that cfi's use scenarios as teaching tools. I have seen some rather good ones come through as well as the ones that haven't ever had a scenario presented to them in training. Anyone on here like to share some scenarios as ideas for others? I think this would be a great forum for that, and I could always get some new ideas as well. Thanks folks...
 
Re: Scenario Based Training

It's pretty impressive, and encouraging, to read some of the thoughts and suggestions from the CFI crowd on training scenarios. I would say that some of the most beneficial "experience" I've received has been in the form of "real life" situations that were completely out of the box of regular emergency procedures and reached a "gray area" of PIC decision making. The answers were many and few 'situations' were even definitive. It would be great if some of the pilots would share real life "gray" situations that CFIs could bank for training. As everyone knows, it isn't the 'situation' that's the focus point... but rather the decision making process and critical thinking.

On a side note... it was interesting to read a previous thread on "you're the captain, you have a engine-fire light illuminate and it goes out (or no indication of a fire)... what do you do?" Well... just a couple days ago that very thing happen to me. The alarm sounded for about 3 seconds, and the light ended up going off as we were about to run critical items of the checklist. All indications suggested that the engine was not on fire, so we decided not to throw the bottles. Just goes to show that anything can happen at any given time.
 
Re: Scenario Based Training

ryan1234 said:
It's pretty impressive, and encouraging, to read some of the thoughts and suggestions from the CFI crowd on training scenarios. I would say that some of the most beneficial "experience" I've received has been in the form of "real life" situations that were completely out of the box of regular emergency procedures and reached a "gray area" of PIC decision making. The answers were many and few 'situations' were even definitive. It would be great if some of the pilots would share real life "gray" situations that CFIs could bank for training. As everyone knows, it isn't the 'situation' that's the focus point... but rather the decision making process and critical thinking.

On a side note... it was interesting to read a previous thread on "you're the captain, you have a engine-fire light illuminate and it goes out (or no indication of a fire)... what do you do?" Well... just a couple days ago that very thing happen to me. The alarm sounded for about 3 seconds, and the light ended up going off as we were about to run critical items of the checklist. All indications suggested that the engine was not on fire, so we decided not to throw the bottles. Just goes to show that anything can happen at any given time.
Click to expand...

I had something like this happen in a UH-60 with a "student"- new to the UH-60- who had been flying for probably 18 years. Our fire lights were light activated and were known to be activated by sunlight if the sun was low on the horizon, but would go out after about 5-10 seconds. It was standard procedure for a crew member to verify that a fire existed prior to firing the bottle. Unfortunately before I could say anything or react the student pulled the fire handle... on the incorrect engine. Fortunately it was not a fire and I was able to slap his hand away before he fired the bottle.
 
Re: Scenario Based Training

Ziggyfuzz said:
Hi all, I am a DPE and a cfi as well as other things (just ask my exes)! I am curious, I am doing a lot of secenario based testing when I give a checkride, and am not yet really seeing correlation happening. The feds are instisting that we do scenario based tests, and that cfi's use scenarios as teaching tools. I have seen some rather good ones come through as well as the ones that haven't ever had a scenario presented to them in training. Anyone on here like to share some scenarios as ideas for others? I think this would be a great forum for that, and I could always get some new ideas as well. Thanks folks...
Click to expand...

I get mine either from experience, errors I've seen pilots make or heard of others making. Also from NTSB reports especially when doing aircraft specific training.
 
Re: Scenario Based Training

Ziggyfuzz said:
Hi all, I am a DPE and a cfi as well as other things (just ask my exes)! I am curious, I am doing a lot of secenario based testing when I give a checkride, and am not yet really seeing correlation happening. The feds are instisting that we do scenario based tests, and that cfi's use scenarios as teaching tools. I have seen some rather good ones come through as well as the ones that haven't ever had a scenario presented to them in training. Anyone on here like to share some scenarios as ideas for others? I think this would be a great forum for that, and I could always get some new ideas as well. Thanks folks...
Click to expand...

I do a lock of mock checkrides with students, and in that situation, I base the scenarios on the cross country planning.
 
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