User Profile Header
airsteve172
,
NY
Comments
Displaying 1-5 of 59
Incentives
from airsteve172
wrote 2 years 17 weeks ago
As we ponder why there are fewer pilots entering the fold, perhaps we should consider the DISINCENTIVES. First of all, there is the cost. Without a doubt it's a factor, although one that has been present throughout the history of aviation and as such there has been no significant change in this area to account for the dwindling numbers of new pilots. So what has changed? Well, a number of things.
Aviation has lost its glamor, particularly in the area of air travel. Where once a passenger was treated graciously with hospitality and respect, now the experience of flying bears a closer resemblence to prisoner transport. Some of the biggest icons of air travel like Pan Am and TWA have gone down the tubes and what remains of the industry will nickel and dime you to death with service that is spartan at best and at worst is willing to keep you imprisoned on an aircraft that isn't going anywhere for 8 or 10 hours. I think you would agree that it would be difficult for any sane individual to fall in love with aviation in this kind of atmosphere.
I'm not sure what flight training was like in the good old days, but when I met with an indifferent attitude at some flight schools I've visited here in the NY area followed by lesson flights given by CFIs who saw me as little more than an inconvenient stepping stone on the path to a job that they really wanted to do, the experience left me less than thrilled. The only real attention that was given to my flight lesson was accounting for every last minute of engine time that I'd have to pay for. Were it not for the fact that I was determined to learn to fly and willing to seek out suitable instruction, this would have been enough to disillusion me on aviation and I would have called it quits right there and then. I suspect that more than a few potential pilots gave up for this exact reason.
A friend whom I had introduced to aviation suffered some frustrating setbacks when several of his instructors went on to "better" jobs during his training and he was forced to spend extra time and money getting familiarized with new instructors. This was at one of the better schools in the Long Island NY area.
Glass cockpits are cool and in order to appeal to foreign students interested in getting their ATP licence, more and more flight schools are jumping on the bandwagon and acquiring new aircraft with all the bells and whistles. That's just great, except if you're looking to be a private pilot who will more than likely be flying an aircraft with steam gauges, but you'll be paying through the nose to train in these fancy aircraft. This trend does nothing to help afforadability for potential pilots and I'm sure some students have looked at this as being more than they bargained for.
Competent high ranking instructors don't work on weekends, do they? Usually not (at least from what I've seen on schedule sheets that I looked at in some schools). Too bad for those of us have to work during the week to pay for lessons.
As much as I've been a fan of aviation all my life, airports never looked inviting to me. It always felt to me like if you weren't there on some official business, you'd be chased off or scrutinized. I may have been excessively timid about visiting airports in the past, but these days that timidity would be well justified considering the security measures that are in place to keep outsiders out. At an airport where I sometimes fly, you now have to pay $75 for an ID tag for the privelage of being able to walk to your aircraft unescorted.
I could go on and on, but this is supposed to be a comment, not an article. If one would actually think about what's happening in aviation, the economy and politics in this country, we'd be too busy being grateful that we still have as many pilots as we do rather than wonder why our numbers are dwindling.
Faking Flight
from airsteve172
wrote 2 years 15 weeks ago
While it's not perfect (like everything else in this world), flight simulation is an incredible resource for a relatively small price. It is something that I would highly recommend to pilots as well as anyone even remotely interested in aviation. By now, I suspect that most of us are aware of the common advantages and shortcomings of flight simulation, but here's an interesting pitfall that some might not have considered.
Some years back (before I decided to take lessons and learn to fly), I discovered Microsoft Flight Simulator and I just loved it. I found it to be challenging and a lot of fun and I spent many hours enjoying myself and improving my skills, expecting to get an edge on things when it came time to get real flying lessons. Well, it worked and it didn't. On the positive side was the fact that I was not a stranger to the layout and the instrumentation in a cockpit. On the negative side was the fact that simulation never acquainted me with the physical sensations or the feedback that you get from an aircraft during operation. Even more problematic was the fact that my simulator flying was self-taught and as such, that led to improper techniques and some bad habits.
I ended up learning to fly at a very small airport with a runway that's 2,400 feet long and although I practiced hundreds of landings in the simulator, when confronted with the real thing for the first time, I felt completely helpless. It took a considerable amount of real flying time and practice before I could land confidently and the fact that I had to overcome some bad habits that I developed in simulation didn't help matters. On second thought, maybe ultimately the simulation was indeed helpful as now I know what to do and what not to do and all the reasons behind it.
I found it very amusing to discover that my simulator skills improved greatly when I had learned to fly the real thing.
One more thing I'd like to mention is the fact that rudder pedals for simulation are VERY important. I've frequently seen people do simulation using the "twist" axis on a joystick for rudder control. That's fine if you're just going to play games, but when it comes to muscle memory, it's best to have the same kind of controls as you have on the plane you typically fly.
All in all, I feel that flight simulation is one of the best and least expensive investments in aviation that anyone can make and besides that, it's fun!
Learning by Screwing Up
from airsteve172
wrote 2 years 14 weeks ago
I agree with this premise wholeheartedly. No matter how many times I watch someone do something the right way, it's ultimately up to me to go through the actions, make mistakes, make adjustments and finally learn from and by my own actions exactly what it takes to get it done right. We all seem to learn differently or at least exhibit different learning patterns and I vividly recall a time when I decided to take skydiving lessons. At the job where I was working, my boss (a very intelligent and stylish lady named Jayne) had heard that I was interested in skydiving and she expressed a huge interest in the idea and had a desire to join me in taking the course that I was planning to do. I gladly accepted her as a partner in learning especially since I had already done several jumps and I felt like I was ahead of the game. The class we were about to take would require a number of weeks to complete including 7 jumps to be done with instructors with each jump being progressively more difficult and requiring a student to learn and demonstrate increasingly greater skills. Each jump would be both a lesson and a test to see if the student was ready for the next step. If the student was unable to perform to the set standards, that particular jump would have to be repeated until the student was ready for the next level. The first day of skydiving class was a day-long lecture during which the students were assured that almost no one completes the class in only 7 jumps although it's possible to do. For several weekends everything was going along smoothly and we were both making steady progress, until we got to level 4. Jayne completed her required full turn to the left then a full turn to the right and tracked forward to redock with the jumpmaster while I became a spinning propeller at 10,000 feet immediately after starting my turn. I needed a bit of time to sort out what I was doing wrong and regain my control, but as he is required to do, the jumpmaster quickly caught up with me, grabbed me and stopped my spin. By then, there was only time left to deploy the parachute at 5,000 feet where students are required to get the chute opened. I was not pleased with my performance, but I was quite satisfied with my altitude awareness and the fact that I was ready and able to deploy the parachute at the correct altitude no matter what. To make a long story shorter, I had to repeat my level 4 jump no less than 5 times, going from bad to worse, experiencing all kinds of problems and learning from them. During my screw-ups, Jayne had graciously taken a few weekends off from lessons, I guess to give me some time to catch up. Eventually, after frustrating at least a few members of the drop zone instructional staff, I finally conquered my stability and control problems and Jayne and I ended up taking our final class jump on the same day. We certainly celebrated on that day and on the following weekend we were scheduled to do our first solo jumps. Jayne had completed her course in an exemplary fashion being the model student while I had nothing but problems, yet now that our solo jump was approaching, Jayne was expressing her fears and reservations. During the time that I was having difficulties, I was getting an education out of it while Jayne merely emulated perfectly what her instructors told her to do and was now apprehensive about what to do on her own without someone's instructions to follow. She was nervous while I felt relatively confident when it came time to do our solos. She survived her solo jump and was happy about that and I was exhilerated about my newfound freedom. She and I did several jumps together as graduate skydivers before she hung up her parachute for good and I continued having logged 678 jumps to this day. The point is that real learning comes only when we are allowed to experience the good, the bad and the ugly for ourselves and out of that comes the confidence and proficiency to truly enjoy whatever it is that we like to do. Hopefully, the jumpmasters and flight instructors are talented enough to give us enough room to learn from our mistakes while keeping us from killing ourselves in the process.
Learning by Screwing Up
from airsteve172
wrote 2 years 14 weeks ago
One more thought if I may.
As students of anything, I'm sure we would all like to outshine everyone else and put in a perfect performance doing whatever is asked or expected of us. Out of this, there is a pressure that we impose on ourselves trying to be great or at least look the part. Maybe that's what keeps us from asking questions that we think might make us look like less than a genius or claiming to our instructors that we understand a concept when it's still quite vague and blurry. Certainly nobody likes to fail or even appear to be a failure, but I think that we as students sometimes forget that we are there to get taught and we are the ones who are in charge as we are the ones hiring the instructor. We might feel guilty for not being able to grasp something as quickly as expected and forget that the instructor has as much responsibilty in presenting information as the student has in absorbing and digesting it. If and when the transfer of skills and information does not go as smoothly as a student might have expected, I believe that too often the student is frustrated and assumes that the fault is all his. It may not even be a conscious process, but a student could decide to fade out from learning to fly in lieu of other activities where he gets a more positive feedback.
I'm not sure what the schools and instructors were like during the era when the pilot population was growing, but having looked around these days, what I see to a great extent is disheartening. A substantial number of instructors these days are now only a step or two removed from being students themselves with their primary objective not focused on being good instructors, but on logging enough air time to get them closer to a job that they really want. The tests that these instructors have passed only indicate that they have the aviations skills and information necessary to be licensed as an instructor, but they have no way of filtering out those whose only intent is to use their students as stepping stones toward a carreer they really want.
In this environment it would be more likely that a new student might give up even after having already spent thousands of dollars. I have no idea what the answer to this might be to this problem, but if a student is at least prepared to do some serious searching for proper instruction, there might be a far greater number of successful outcomes.
Learning by Screwing Up
from airsteve172
wrote 2 years 14 weeks ago
Sometimes an instructor can teach you a lot by saying nothing.
I had just finished an hour of flying by instruments under the hood with my primary instructor, a very vocal and loud old timer who will not let any fault go by unnoticed or unmentioned. We were cruising on a 170 heading at 1,500 feet when he told me to remove the hood. I asked him where we were and he instantly replied that we were over the airport. Before I could get a good look out the window and enjoy the relative ease of flying by sight, he pulled back the throttle to idle and said, "you have an emergency, now land it". While I focused all my attention on quickly calculating how to get the plane down, he didn't say a single word to me except he was kind enough to make the radio calls and let me concentrate. I figured I'd make a prompt U turn that would put me on the left downwind in the pattern for runway 18. Once I was headed downwind with the best airspeed, I now had to figure out the right moment to make a U turn that would be my base and final. Still not a peep out of the instructor. As we headed downwind, at one point my senses told me that now was the right time to hook a turn that would place me over the runway even though we hadn't yet reached the end (beginning?) of runway 18. With a steady airspeed of 70 I eased the Skyhawk into a very definite left turn that caused the plane to sink exactly the amount that I thought it would and suddenly we were poised over the runway to make a perfect landing. The wheels touched down gently and I had just enough speed left over that I could coast the plane right to its parking spot that was just off to the right at the end of the runway. The flaps didn't need to be retracted because I didn't use them and the brakes hardly neede to be applied as I let the plane roll to its spot. I was in hog heaven ready to scream the loudest WAHOO anybody's ever heard, but the instructor still wasn't saying a word and never said anything about my "emergency landing" thereafter.
So what did I learn? Although he never gave me any feedback about what I might have done right or wrong, I learned what I could do on my own and maybe it's not exactly the way he would have done it, but he gave me the opportunity to try and see what did and didn't work for me. Happily, my choise of actions worked out perfectly and I can't help but think that his complete silence was in part due to the fact that just as he might have been getting ready to give me a lecture for screwing up this or that, instead, he got surprised with a flawless landing. LOL
- 1 of 12
- ››
Newsletter Signup
Marketplace
Find great Products & Services!
Partner Pages
