[Phys-l] piloting +- critical thinking

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 09/06/2011 01:53 PM, Edmiston, Mike wrote:
> John, how do you feel about your airplane pilot students?  Once they
> have had a successful take off, and a successful landing, are they
> done?  Is everything else busy work?

Good question.  As you might imagine, I've thought about 
that a little bit.

It turns out that nobody learns much about landings by
practicing landings.  If they know how to land ... and
especially if they don't ... it pays to practice the 
various skills that go into a good landing, and most of 
these skills can be practiced /better/ in other ways.  
For starters, landing involves flying very slowly a few 
inches above the ground, and if you aren't adept at
flying slowly at 3000 feet above ground level, you've 
got no business trying to land.

The one thing that can't be practiced in flight is the
crucial ability to judge how high we are off the ground
... and even that can be -- and should be -- practiced
in other ways.  I can teach you about that on the taxiway,
while we are taxiing out for takeoff, which is the exact
opposite of busywork.  This could have been dead time,
but no, we can learn something interesting and important
in that time.

Another point is that every flight necessarily involves
at least one takeoff and one landing, so the topic
comes up naturally.  This is identical to the point I
made about Thévenin and Norton equivalents:  There is
no point in lecturing about them for 90 minutes if
they are going to come up /naturally/ in small ways
at frequent intervals for the rest of your life.  We 
aren't avoiding or neglecting the subject, but we 
don't need to attack it directly all the time.  The
indirect approach serves most of the purpose.

This does *not* mean that my classmates and I were 
expected to "see something once, understand it" and 
remember it forever.  Instead, I would say that many 
of the ingredients become part of the broth, rather 
than remaining as separately recognizable chunks.

I'm a big fan of the spiral approach.  Remember the
proverb:  People tend to overestimate short-term change
and underestimate long-term change.

Another point is that "most" of the time your untrained
12-year-old niece could land the plane just fine.  The
requirement for pilots is that they need to do it just
fine *all* of the time, not just most of the time.  So
when the lesson does involve landings, with somebody who
is not a rank beginner, I make sure it involves all
sorts of bad scenarios ... things that we don't even
talk about to non-pilots, because it would scare them
out of their wits.  A big part of the lesson is to make
sure the pilot *keeps* his wits even in worst-case
situations.  This includes obvious things like
forced landings with no engine power.  That sounds
scary, but in fact the airplane glides just fine.  People
think it is a "miracle" that Sully Sullenberger was able
to land that airliner in the Hudson after losing both
engines.  It's not a miracle.  He knew exactly what he
was doing.  We practice stuff like that ... and worse.

In other words:  I pretty much guarantee that the lesson
will be interesting.  Indeed, when a student comes to me
needing a checkout, I ask:  Do you want a routine by-the-
book checkout for the required amount of time, or do you
want to spend the time doing something challenging and
interesting?  Maybe one time in a hundred the customer
wants to do the busywork and go home.  Even if the customer
is an airline pilot with ten times the experience and ten
times the skill that I have, he still needs a checkout
(it's the rules) and I can make the lesson interesting.
For one thing, he's probably really good at flying by
reference to instruments, and accustomed to landing on
long runways, so we can go to the shortest runway in
the state and cover up all of the instruments -- I
mean *all* of them -- and let him land the plane a
few times.  It's good practice.  It's easier than you
might imagine ... if you know how to think about the
problem properly.

There is a certain amount of self-selection involved here.
The students who just want to meet the minimum requirements
probably aren't going to pick me as their instructor.
Word gets around.  It's sorta like electives in school.
The way I figure it, I need to take "some" elective, so 
I might as well take one where I'll learn something
useful.  In school, this has the potential to mess up 
your GPA, but in the not-very-long-run that doesn't 
matter ... and knowing useful things matters a great 
deal more.  In flying, there is no GPA.  Mostly it's
about holding /yourself/ to high standards.  Making a
landing that is safe by a wide margin under worse-
case conditions during practice is more fun than
making a perfect landing under easy conditions.

So we come again to the main point:  I vehemently disagree 
with the proverb that says "practice makes perfect".  It
would be better to say "practice makes permanent".  If 
you are practicing the wrong things, practice is worse 
than nothing.

This is IMHO the one of the defining properties of a good
teacher, namely that he can teach you twice as much in 
half the time.  Some of that involves motivation, and 
some of it involves knowing just what to study and /how/
to study it, so as to make the learning more efficient.