The last 7 years of watching and participating in the business of flight instruction has brought me to the conclusion that the instructor community is not teaching students good reasoning and decision making skills. The message in the most basic sense is that instructors are constantly making decisions to protect students rather than allowing students to gain valuable decision making experience. Instructors look at the weather, instructors cancel flights, and instructors tell students what to do during the entire course of training. Then, the student takes a check ride, the instructor is gone from the picture and the student has not learned how to effectively manage and evaluate the flight environment. The result is often that the student hurts him or herself and often others. There are numerous real-world examples of the kind of critical thinking skills that are not being taught. For example, most pilots have the idea that airplanes must land on runways at airports. Some pilots may recognize that a taxi-way is also acceptable, but consider how many private pilots make VFR flights into IMC as a futile effort to make it to an airport. Students need to be taught to think outside the box and consider a variety of alternatives such as... when the weather started to get bad turn around. If it's too bad to turn around where is the nearest airport. Ok, weather is getting even worse... while we can still see something a good decision would be a landing on the road of choice rather than a flight into the mountain. Here in the Rockies, each year at least one pilot flies the direct route into high terrain without evaluating the variables (density altitude, aircraft performance, terrain elevation). The result is a perfectly good airplane and an otherwise capable pilot hitting a mountain in the remote wilderness. More times than not the result is death. My primary goal when working with pilots (ATP's or students) is to teach the pilot what the variables are, how to evaluate the variables and the decision making to resolve the problems rather than rote teaching of hard fast rules and hands on skills. This isn't to say hands-on skills are not important, but as John and Martha King say.... Bad technical skills will result in a trip to the insurance agent, bad decision making skills will kill you. It is my goal as an instructor to teach students to recognize when and how variables play into certain situations, and impart a true understanding of how airplanes, the environment, and the pilot have to function together to make flight safe and enjoyable.
Loren French
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