When I was learning to fly, I had a wonderful flight instructor. He was great at teaching ground school, explaining what was going on in the cockpit and talking me through each maneuver. There was only one problem. He talked too much. He talked so much that during my first solo, the strangest sensation was not the fact that I was controlling the airplane all by myself. It was the eerie quiet in the cockpit.
After becoming a flight instructor and teaching several students to fly, I decided to take a different approach. Certainly, I talk my students through maneuvers, but once they have reached a certain skill level I find that there is a great value in quietly allowing the students to make mistakes. I believe patiently waiting for them to discover that the altitude or heading is off is much better than stating “watch the altitude” or “watch your heading.”
