Muscle Memory

Have you encountered a situation or hazardous condition that yielded lessons on how to better manage the risks involved in flying? Do you have an experience to share with Aviation Safetys readers about an occasion that taught you something significant about ways to conduct safer flight operations? If so, we want to hear about it.

Editorial Staff

Monday, January 09, 2017 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Pilots often experience "muscle memory" problems when adapting to different aircraft or even switching seats, leading to incorrect control inputs.
These issues arise from ingrained habits related to specific hand-to-control configurations or reversed switch layouts across different airplanes.
Such muscle memory can lead to critical errors, like accidentally retracting landing gear instead of flaps, underscoring the importance of careful training and verifying controls before activation.

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Way back when I was working on my flight instructor certificate, I was surprised to have some initial trouble acclimating to the right seat. It wasn’t a matter of being able to reach everything necessary to safely fly the plane, a Cessna 172RG Cutlass, or needing to adjust my sight pictures. Instead, it had to do with literally years of using one hand on the yoke and the other for the throttle.

The best description of the problem I can give involves approaching a runway for landing and needing to slow the descent just a bit before flaring. When seated in the left seat, the tendency is to pull back slightly on the yoke with the left hand and ease in the throttle just a bit with the right. Switch seats, though, and attempting to add that same slight amount of energy with the same hand movements results in pitching the nose down when you want it to come up.