Flight Instruction

[Colonel]

I am firmly convinced that teaching is entirely an illusion.  It is not real.

[i]Learning[/i] is real.  Sometimes, people learn, and sometimes they do not,
but there is amazingly little correlation between when learning occurs, and
when teaching happens.

Learning can easily (and often) occur in the entire absence of teaching. 

Conversely, there can be an enormous amount of teaching going on, and
absolutely no learning whatsoever.

The above needs to be in the foreword of the FTM.

I am a minimalist.  As time goes by, I strive to boil things down, and peel
off the unnecessary. 

Blatant heresy, but after 25 years, I learned that a flight instructor needs
to do precisely two things:

1) know about flying, to provide a skilled example and answer questions, and
2) stop students from killing themselves, while they teach themselves to fly.

All else is rubbish.  Cockpit is a shit classroom.

Before you take off, you might mention one or two things.  Anything more
than that is a waste of time and muddles and confuses the student, because
that's the maximum they are capable of remembering.

Keep it simple.  Strip off the unnecessary.  Focus only on the essential. 

TC wants you to teach a 5 hour ground lesson covering 947 items, but they
don't know very much about flight instruction.  Guess how much of that the
student is going to retain.  Maybe 1%, maybe not even that much.

A great example of this is a multi-engine takeoff.  If you do it the TC way,
you will die if something goes wrong.

I am not a natural teacher.  I'm a natural pilot, but really, a marginal teacher
at best.  After many years, I learned that it really didn't matter.

I could always jump into any strange airplane and fly the snot out of it, and I could
always explain what I was doing, because I understood the physics of what was
going on.  That was  enough.  And let's face it, better than 99.9% of the flight
instruction today.

Food for thought:  BD Maule - nice old guy, he liked me for some reason I never
understood - [u]taught himself to fly after reading a book[/u], and building an airplane. 

I'm pretty sure old BD wasn't taught to do this by the local flight school:

[img width=500 height=300]http://avweb02.ipp-las-topaz.iproductio ... l317r6.jpg[/img]

Colton Harris Moore taught himself to fly, too.

Remember that, the next time you are struggling with some flight instruction
and are on the receiving end of some bureaucratic-approved Death By Briefingâ„¢.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

We must be twins.

[Colonel]

Heh.  What I have noticed over the decades is that many paths lead to the same place.

Not everyone ends up in the same place, though.