Somewhere, as you read this, an advanced pilot candidate is decrying the need to master the so-called commercial maneuvers. “You’ll never hear ATC call and say, ‘Give me a Lazy 8 for spacing,’” they might say. And they’d probably be right. The thing is, many of the maneuvers we must master to pass a practical test are often taught as what I call “checkride circus tricks”—something we learn for the sole purpose of demonstrating we can perform them.
Meanwhile, the FAA’s Aviation Instructor Handbook (FAA-H-8083-9B) tells us correlation is the highest level of learning, “associating what has been learned, understood, and applied with previous or subsequent learning.” But it seems flight instruction does not always take flight-skills preparation to the correlation level. Let’s look at what our instructors are really trying to teach us by correlating checkride maneuvers to real-world flying skills.
