How To Give Good Ground Instruction

[Colonel]

Giving good ground instruction is often the most difficult task
a new flight instructor learns, and struggles with on the flight test.

I feel that often, this is merely because the flight instructor that
taught him, was not very good at it, either. It's hard to teach what
you don't know, and don't understand very well.

Ground instruction is much like high alpha flight, rudder usage
and taildragger flying. Most people struggle with it because they
were taught by someone who wasn't very good at it.

Watch this:



This is obviously horrible ground instruction. Tell me ONE THING
that you could tell this instructor to do, that would most improve
his ground instruction technique - and why.

[Liquid_Charlie]

slow the fuck down and make eye contact and shit can the black board and chalk, or cut off his finger nails. I hate black boards

Seriously though, that is why I advocate a truly immersed learning system for would be instructors. If you are going to instruct you need professional teaching to give you the skills. This present system we have is producing a very low standard of instruction and at the mega dollars paid out by students they deserve better. Get people licences within the TC guidelines, what a concept.

Nothing here against a student in anyway but as stated here 25 hours to solo, that certainly reflects on the instructor. Soloing is about stick and rudder skills. They load a person up with so much other crap the actual flying of the aircraft becomes secondary. I see student pilots hauling 50 lb flight bags around, damn. We use to walk out to the aircraft with just a map in our back pocket. I guess the question for me is, has all the extra shit improved safety.? Not from what I see every day. As the colonel says on a regular basis "there will be no new causes for aviation accidents this year "

People need to get back to worrying about hands and feet rather than if the IPAD is charged.

[Colonel]

25 hours to solo

With a reasonably motivated student with any aptitude, with
good flight instruction a student should be solo around 10-12
hours.

More than that, either the student or the instructor is doing
something noticeably suboptimal.

Anyways. There is no "right answer" to the ONE THING the
above parachute instructor could do better .. but I would tell
him that after you teach a sub-section, to stop and ask the
students questions about that sub-section, to ensure that
the student at least partially understands it, before you move
onto the next sub-section.

This instructor is an output-only device. Students would only
learn, in spite of him, not because of him. You would be amazed
at how much so-called "learning" is like that.

Ground instruction is obviously not just a 200TT flight instructor
task. At many points in your life, you will be required to present
or teach some information to people. Learn to do that.

[John Swallow]

When I was posted back to Canada to become a T-Bird instructor, I first underwent a three week course at the School of Instructional Technique - basically instructing in a classroom situation.

Next was a six week, 80 hour course at the Flying Instructors School in Portage La Prairie, MB. The first half of the course - around forty hours - was designed to hone the candidates flying skills. The second half of the course was designed to hone the candidate's instructing/fault finding skills. This course ensured a high level of instructor flying proficiency, that the candidate's knowledge of instruction techniques was of a high calibre, and, more importantly, that the instruction given was the same - whether you took the T-Bird course in Portage, Moose Jaw, or Gimli, you would receive the same information and would be graded to the same standard.

For obvious reasons, I fear this is not the case in the 'real' world...

[Colonel]

Certain activities, like riding motorcycles, flying airplanes, writing code and screwing
came naturally to me. It didn't take much effort to do them, and with some practice,
I think I got pretty good at them.

Teaching, at least for me, was really hard. I was a really shitty teacher when I started
out, and I shudder to think about my first students. It took me a long time to figure out
the basics of how people's brains worked, and how to teach. Tailwheel training. Spin
recovery. Unusual attitude recovery. Negative G formation aerobatics. People have
serious psychological difficulties dealing with these situations in a rational, logical
manner, and they are mercilessly ridiculed in the accident reports by the @sshole
investigators with their bullshit revisionism.

I was such a bad teacher, even after 25 years of doing it, I really wasn't very good at it.
I made up for it because I understood the subject material really well, I could break it
down into bite-sized blocks, and I could talk about the theory and then demonstrate it.

More importantly, after a lifetime of flying, I figured out what was important, and what
was bullshit. Don't waste the student's time teaching bullshit. His time (and yours) are
precious - spend it teaching good stuff. That's one of the most important things about
being a good teacher - people will always pressure you to waste time on stupid stuff,
and you need to resist that. Learn to prioritize, as both a teacher and in the cockpit.

NOTAMs are a fantastic example of people on the ground trying to fuck pilots up by
trying to obfuscate the information they need to know - runway and approach aid closures -
with all sorts of bullshit they will never care about.

From a bit of systems knowledge and stick & rudder skill, I learned how to check reasonably
competent pilots out in the C421 in half a day. It's a fire-breathing dragon, we are told.
Utter bullshit. I spent many years teaching in Pitts and homebuilts and jets, because no
one else would bother to.

Dear Old Dad used to check out ex-Sabre pilots in the -104, and they were terrified to slow
it down, because it would kill them. Nonsense, Dear Old Dad would say, and they would do
a hammerhead (they called it a stall turn) with the effective AOA nicely controlled.

It's really too bad no one teaches how to teach, because it's really important. At least
to the student. And we are all students at one time or another. Not all of us climb out
of the womb, clenching an ATPL in one tiny fist and a stack of logbooks in the other.

Here's a guy with an IQ of 160 talking about an even smarter guy who happened to be
an incredibly good teacher as well as mind-blowing, Nobel Physics-prize smart. A unicorn.



Most Profs I had were, at best, pretty marginal in the classroom, despite the PhD's and
decades of research. Just because you're good at something, doesn't mean you can teach
it worth shit. Ask any fighter pilot to do primary training.

[JW Scud]

Certain activities, like riding motorcycles, flying airplanes, writing code and screwing
came naturally to me. It didn't take much effort to do them, and with some practice,
I think I got pretty good at them.

Teaching, at least for me, was really hard. I was a really shitty teacher when I started
out, and I shudder to think about my first students. It took me a long time to figure out
the basics of how people's brains worked, and how to teach. Tailwheel training. Spin
recovery. Unusual attitude recovery. Negative G formation aerobatics. People have
serious psychological difficulties dealing with these situations in a rational, logical
manner, and they are mercilessly ridiculed in the accident reports by the @sshole
investigators with their bullshit revisionism.

I was such a bad teacher, even after 25 years of doing it, I really wasn't very good at it.
I made up for it because I understood the subject material really well, I could break it
down into bite-sized blocks, and I could talk about the theory and then demonstrate it.

More importantly, after a lifetime of flying, I figured out what was important, and what
was bullshit. Don't waste the student's time teaching bullshit. His time (and yours) are
precious - spend it teaching good stuff. That's one of the most important things about
being a good teacher - people will always pressure you to waste time on stupid stuff,
and you need to resist that. Learn to prioritize, as both a teacher and in the cockpit.

NOTAMs are a fantastic example of people on the ground trying to fuck pilots up by
trying to obfuscate the information they need to know - runway and approach aid closures -
with all sorts of bullshit they will never care about.

From a bit of systems knowledge and stick & rudder skill, I learned how to check reasonably
competent pilots out in the C421 in half a day. It's a fire-breathing dragon, we are told.
Utter bullshit. I spent many years teaching in Pitts and homebuilts and jets, because no
one else would bother to.

Dear Old Dad used to check out ex-Sabre pilots in the -104, and they were terrified to slow
it down, because it would kill them. Nonsense, Dear Old Dad would say, and they would do
a hammerhead (they called it a stall turn) with the effective AOA nicely controlled.

It's really too bad no one teaches how to teach, because it's really important. At least
to the student. And we are all students at one time or another. Not all of us climb out
of the womb, clenching an ATPL in one tiny fist and a stack of logbooks in the other.

Here's a guy with an IQ of 160 talking about an even smarter guy who happened to be
an incredibly good teacher as well as mind-blowing, Nobel Physics-prize smart. A unicorn.



Most Profs I had were, at best, pretty marginal in the classroom, despite the PhD's and
decades of research. Just because you're good at something, doesn't mean you can teach
it worth shit. Ask any fighter pilot to do primary training.

Got any tips for us about screwing.

[Colonel]

I am glad to hear that you have mastered riding motorcycles, flying airplanes and coding!

[John Swallow]

"It's really too bad no one teaches how to teach, because it's really important."

Very true. I don't know about the US, but in Canada, there's no central agency that teaches how to instruct; I think Class One instructors do the job. Which, in essence, means no standardization.

J