Measuring cross-country route distance

[mooneyguy]

I am off to work so I do not have time to read the rest but I saw this and have a quick comment. You are teaching a visual student who shouldn't be using VORs in any way for any kind of primary form of navigation. The VOR is a back up for visual flying and IMO spending more time on it than what is needed to teach identification and basic operations (maybe an hour total) is a waste of your students time.

The way I look at it, if they are flying around in conditions that often require the use of VOR navigation then they likely will be dead soon anyways. IMO save the VOR navigation for instrument students. Just my 2 cents though, cya.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I think its a disservice by not teaching a PPL applicant to be a fully competent pilot. The DPE's in our area WILL fail a student for not having a thorough knowledge of vor usage and the ability to use them. Its great to use pilotage / deadreckoning, but the use of vor navigation by VFR pilots is just as acceptable.
Once the PPL student has his ticket he is free to go anywhere he desires, and some parts of the country you WILL have to know how to use VOR to get around safely.

 

[MidlifeFlyer]

Again as I have said in previous posts, for you or any career pilot, fine this will work.

I'm not a career pilot. I'm a weekend warrior. My students are almost exclusively people with busy non-aviation careers who can barely devote an hour or so every week to instruction.

For the typical 5 - 10 hour a year weekend warrior, which are the kind of pilots I teach, flight following will do nothing but help them. Should they land themselves in an emergency they will have but one less step to deal with, which for a pilot that doesn't fly that much the less they have to do in an emergency the better. This goes for any pilot of course, but is especially true if the pilot has less recent experience and less total time/experience.

Exactly how does flight following help a pilot in areas below radar coverage where there is no flight following or when "workload permitted" means controllers won't provide the service?

I'm going to disagree with you about that 5-10 hour per year pilot. Pilots will vary and my guess is that most will not be able to maintain good chart reading skills and be able to competently compare what's on the chart with what's on the ground. You may be doing them a disservice my focusing them on a skill they will not be able to effectively use.

For others, tuning in and intercepting a navigation signal is very intuitive =and= it's a skill they can practice at home on a number of websites without even the investment in a PC- flight simulator.

When teaching do you determine for each student which is the easier for them to learn and retain or do you think in terms of, "this is they way I decided they should fly" (which is what is coming across in these posts).

 

[eliteflight]

You are teaching a visual student who shouldn't be using VORs in any way for any kind of primary form of navigation. The VOR is a back up for visual flying and IMO spending more time on it than what is needed to teach identification and basic operations (maybe an hour total) is a waste of your students time.

I teach all my Private students to use the VOR proficiently, both as primary navigation, and as a backup to pilotage and dead reckoning. Doing so is not a waste of time. Rather, failing to do so would be negligent on my part.

1) Examiners will fail students who can't track a VOR radial with wind correction (Area VII Task B and Area IX Task F), or use a VOR or VOR/DME to find their position (Area VII Task D).

2) The vast majority of the terrain in the US is not near a populated area, meaning that at night, there are very few reliable landmarks. On a moonless night, there may be no landmarks at all. VOR (or GPS) becomes the only option for primary navigation, with the occasional visual landmark as backup.

3) Most pilots never go beyond the Private Certificate, so I teach them everything they could possibly use as a VFR-only pilot. That includes all methods of navigation, independently, and in combination. I also do this for students who I know are going on to do instrument training, because it's better preparation for jumping into the world of instrument navigation.

4) This one is personal preference, and some may disagree, but I teach my students to a standard higher than the PTS. I don't teach people to pass the checkride, I teach them to be safe, skilled pilots. When they go for their checkride, they can fly to Commercial tolerances, and they are proficient with every piece of equipment in the airplane (even the autopilot, if there is one). We discuss this in our initial meeting, and I give them the option of choosing a different instructor if they don't want to make the extra effort. In eight years, no one has taken that offer, and every one has passed on their first attempt. And, despite all of that "wasted time", my students finish in about 50 hours, well below the national average.

 

[shdw]

I have no idea why everyone keeps saying "to not teach it," when did I ever say I was not teaching VORs? I said, "what is needed to teach identification and basic operations (maybe an hour total) is a waste of your students time."

I have had no problem with my students understanding and using VORs they are not rocket science. I make them read up and we spend about an 30 minutes discussing basic operations and I answer any questions from their reading. I then introduce the VOR that lesson, we debrief, they go home and practice online and the next lesson for we spend about 10 minutes talking about it and 20 minutes online. Then out to the airplane for another 30 minutes or so during a cross country usually. So far I haven't had any problems with this approach, the VOR is fairly easy to use.

Edit: Forgot they get about another 1.5 from cross country time, I do the night lesson exclusively VOR tracking under the hood.



Midlife, I use http://www.luizmonteiro.com/Learning_VOR_Sim.aspx and since you brought it up I figure I will ask, do you know if this is one of the better ones or if there are better ones?

If there is no radar, climb higher, as for workload permitting I live 20 minutes from NYC by air, about 40 NM. I have never once been turned down for flight following in the last 8 months flying here. Controllers are pretty good about that now, and if you don't have radar in your area at all then look up making a position report.



Food for thought, many many pilots navigated terrain all over the world without so much as a map and they somehow learned how to make it home. It can be taught and it can be remembered to fly by only pilotage with a fair amount of ease if you take the time to learn how to do it yourself.

I would venture to say very few CFIs that are or when they were under 500 hours probably couldn't have successfully navigated purely VFR and would feel incredibly uncomfortable if put in an aircraft with the absolute minimum equipment and a single radio. Sure some would, but 80 percent or so would flounder and end up lost I know I would have, maybe still will if it was an unfamiliar area.

My opinion is that this is a shame. I saw this flight when I did my glider cross country and I had a "professional" flight education if that means anything.

 

[wjmiller3]

I would venture to say very few CFIs that are or when they were under 500 hours probably couldn't have successfully navigated purely VFR and would feel incredibly uncomfortable if put in an aircraft with the absolute minimum equipment and a single radio. Sure some would, but 80 percent or so would flounder and end up lost I know I would have, maybe still will if it was an unfamiliar area.

I doubt that.

Now would it ease the workload, and make the flight more relaxing if I could just hit "Direct Enter Enter" and fly the course? Absolutly, but I doubt that I would get lost, that is of course if I had the one radio. Now put me in a plane that has no electrics and tell me to fly across the state of Texas... Now if that is what you were talking about then yes, it would make me a little uncomfortable even now to do a long X/C.

 

[MidlifeFlyer]

If there is no radar, climb higher,

Silly flatlander. See, you're still assuming your little corner of the world and your own personal experience represents the universe of what's out there.

Sure, go fly where line-of sight communication is limited by 14,000' mountains and at 13,000' you can't even reach Flight Watch and tell VFR pilots near or in excess of their service ceiling to "climb higher."

I've heard FF denied for both workload and coverage reasons - even in New England and Florida.

I think I'm done. I won't even comment on your description of using the night cross country as an instrument training platform rather than for teaching night visual flight.

 

[shdw]

Silly flatlander. See, you're still assuming your little corner of the world and your own personal experience represents the universe of what's out there.

Sure, go fly where line-of sight communication is limited by 14,000' mountains and at 13,000' you can't even reach Flight Watch and tell VFR pilots near or in excess of their service ceiling to "climb higher."

I've heard FF denied for both workload and coverage reasons - even in New England and Florida.

I think I'm done. I won't even comment on your description of using the night cross country as an instrument training platform rather than for teaching night visual flight.

I actually tend to be a fan of statistics and statistically the type of flying I am seeing accounts for a much greater portion of flying. If you need different ops to fly in the mountains, fine use them. You and the other 3-5 percent of the total GA industry that spends time in the mountains can teach however you need to. However, for the other 90 percent of us flight following is a feasible option.

As for the night flying, every student I have had so far and the majority in our area will not fly at night simply because they are not comfortable. The chances of flying at night and finding yourself without a horizon refering to the instruments is far greater than day, anything under 10 miles Vis which is pretty much constantly when you live between NYC and Phili. So because my area has generally low visibility during night operations I teach my students to safely navigate with a VORs on that lesson.

They get 2 hours of night other than that, one for introduction purposes and the other for night navigation (pilotage only) which I use to navigate instead of the XC. Again statistics plays a major roll in this for me, the majority of flying is not done at night and even less of it is done XC at night by a typical GA PPL.

The approach I see here reminds me of the golfer that spends a day at the driving range with 4 clubs spending 25 percent of his time with the driver, 25 percent with 3 wood and the rest with his irons. That golfer should realize that statistically his driver/3wood will account for about 15 percent of his game but he spends 50 percent of his time practicing it. I think this situation is riddled and intertwined throughout the aviation teaching environment.

 

[floridaCFII]

I teach everything. Pilotage, dead reckoning, VOR use, GPS use, autopilot use (if equipped), etc. There's no logical reason for a student of any level not to know how to correctly and fully use every piece of equipment in the cockpit.

It's much better to know how to use it and not need it, than it is to need it, but not know how to use it.

 

[beechpilot84]

Pilotage first, then VOR, then GPS. Either way a student should always have a chart out and know where they are and be able to use all avialable navigation equipment in the airplane they fly. If they do the chances of getting lost are at a minimum.

 

[subpilot]

Well, I got into this one last night for my students night PPL cross country. They planned between two airports that were only 95NM apart but they zig-zaged the course to make the total route flown over 100NM. (One way only, other pilot flies back). I mentioned that the distance has to be measured straight line from airport to airport but the student and lead instructor both argued saying that this is how it has been done for years and is not a problem (calculating total distance based on Nav log and not straight line). I objected but basically backed down and went with it and if we have to do the flight over again then at least I can say "I told them".