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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