Rotorcraft Flight Manual

Winds Aloft When You're Never That Aloft

The Winds Aloft Forecast (FD) is a prediction of wind direction, wind speed, and temperature at altitudes from 3000 MSL to FL390. I’m adding an FD Helicopters Mini-Lesson on this weather product, but it basically focuses on what we might be using the FD for.

Maybe you don’t even look at this report (or the wind streamlines chart) during your pre-flight planning, and only venture to decipher it prior to check rides. For helicopter pilots, the goofy rules that kick in closer to the stratosphere than we’re ever going to be (like wind speeds >99 knots, and the different nomenclature for below-zero temps at altitudes above FL240) make the FD seem more like fodder for trick questions than a practical tool. I’ve always considered it simply as a back-up source for figuring my en-route winds on cross-country flights, but here’s something cool that the FD table can tell you. Check out this FD from over Nantucket (ACK) for today, and specifically look at the 12000 and 18000 columns:

FT	3000	6000	9000	12000	18000	24000	30000	34000	39000
ACK	3310	3414-05	3212-11	2812-17	2845-28	2863-39	286552	295352	293752

Well, it’s not a brilliant example (but it’s the best I could do today), but between 12000 and 18000, the wind speed is forecast to increase from 12 to 45 knots, or 5.5 knots per 1000 feet. As a rule of thumb, when wind speed increases by >6 knots per 1000 feet, you can expect moderate or greater turbulence.* I’m not going to call it definitive–and keep in mind that the FD is just a forecast–but at the time there were a couple of PIREPs for light to moderate turbulence in the KBOS area.

This came up for me before my commercial cross-country flight. I was looking forward to flying into a mountain airport (KMYL) and the weather was pretty much a go as far as I was concerned. Winds were dead calm at KMYL, and the sky was clear below 12000, as it usually is in the Boise Valley. The one thing bothering me was an AIRMET Tango overlying KMYL. It didn’t go down to the surface, but it did get close enough to the altitude we’d be flying to get into this airport that it had me thinking over whether it was going to be safe to make the flight. I remember being a bit baffled by the calm winds at KMYL and the high winds at the 9000 foot level for the KLWS FD. I talked it over with the CP and, even though he didn’t tell me outright not to make the flight, I didn’t get the feeling that he’d do it. So I bailed on that cross-country, and ended up second-guessed that decision extensively—I’d just cost the school’s owner a 4-hour block on that helicopter, and another student was walking out to do that exact same flight solo (until her instructor called her back after I decided not to go on my flight). It wasn’t until months later that it hit me: that AIRMET Tango was probably there because of the turbulence between the dead calm layer near the surface and an overlying windy layer, and that’s probably about the altitude I’d have been flying at to get over the ridgeline and into KMYL.

So even though the FD might not look especially relevant for a flight at 1000 AGL, you can still use it to guess when and where you might encounter turbulence. In the absence of better info (like a PIREP with wind or turbulence reported), a difference in wind speed at the surface reported on a METAR and forecast winds at the lowest altitude from the FD could be a warning sign. For example, if the winds forecast for KXYZ (elev 18 MSL) on the FD was:

FT	3000	6000	9000	12000	18000	24000	30000	34000	39000
XYZ	3129	3133-01	3138-04	3044-08	3045-17	2845-28	286042	275952	275460

and the METAR was reporting:

KXYZ 132256Z 20006KT 10SM SCT160 15/07 A3005

You might want to consider the possibility of a bumpy ride.

*I’ve seen this in a few places, but the closest that I could get to for a credible source is an old Navy manual, the Aerographer’s Mate 14010. Unfortunately, it’s not in AC 00-45F (Aviation Weather Services), AC 00-6A (Aviation Weather), or the AIM. It was also the topic of a question in AOPA Pilot (Nov 2009).

Two New Lessons

What I wanted to get across with these 2 lessons isn’t the content of them, but where they fit in a helicopter flight training syllabus. The first lesson is Helicopter Main Rotor Systems (MRS), and the second is Helicopter Crew Resource Management (CRM). Neither of them are lessons that would get a student excited, and if I told you CRM was all part of Aeronautical Decision Making (ADM), that would probably further dampen your enthusiasm. Main Rotor Systems is the very first thing in the FAA’s Rotorcraft Flight Manual, right there on page 1-1. It comes before helicopter flight controls (page 1-3), helicopter aerodynamics (Ch 2), weight and balance (Ch 7), and even basic helicopter flight maneuvers (Ch 9). CRM is one very long paragraph in Chapter 14, and it starts off with something about the airlines. Seven pages later, you’re reading about some crazy thing called an autogyro.

Just judging from where these 2 topics are in the RFM, which one do you think is more important? Which one are you going to use earlier in your training, and throughout your training? Which one is going to make a bigger impression on you–the one you see when you’re fresh and excited about becoming a helicopter pilot, or the one that you have to get done before your check ride next week?

That’s my point. ADM and CRM are things that should be with you starting with the first few hours you log. These 2 topics, though, are shoved to the back of the RFM (and things like Aeromedical Factors didn’t even make it into the RFM). Of course, you don’t have to learn things in this order, but if you don’t know any better, you’re going to read the RFM from front to back like any other book, right? What about your school? Well, the easy thing for a school to do is to just follow the FAA’s lead, and here’s the result:

MRS is the very first lesson, and, along with anti-torque and flight controls, gets a generous 2 hours. ADM is the second to last lesson, and gets 1.5 hrs. Again, what does this tell you?

Operationally, I’ve seen plenty of students and instructors roll their eyes and use diminutive descriptors (“such bullshit“) when referring to ADM-type topics. I’ll also admit that I was one of them. Part of my 1.5 hr ADM lesson was spent joking with my instructor to the point of shortening the DECIDE model to the DIE model (Detect, Identify, Evaluate). The chief pilot and in-house DPE wasn’t amused, but Exhibit A: primacy and Exhibit B: he didn’t do much to impress the value of ADM on me afterward.

That actually came $400 later at the HAI Flying in the Wire and Obstruction Environment course. I signed up for that class not knowing really what would be covered, so I was a bit surprised that about 1/3 of that class was ADM/CRM. The instructor’s approach to CRM wasn’t a historical account of what the airlines did, or a series of acronyms that had no operational significance, or what some desk jockey needed to do to implement a CRM system to please upper management. A lot of it was just talking about how we screw up and miscommunicate, and some simple bullet points to tell you how to get out of that rut. By starting the class with CRM, he made the point that “Hey, CRM is critical to surviving the wire environment!” It’s more important than learning where to look for wires, what kind of wires are out there, what weather conditions are more conducive to wire strikes. All the interesting stuff, in summary, is secondary to good operational procedures and crew communication. Is flight training so benign that CRM/ADM is effectively just an appendix to your primary training? (For that matter, if you’re doing off-airport landings, you are in the wire environment.)

I’d been meaning to write up a few lessons on CRM/ADM, and something from the Wire Environment course, but it was a post on VerticalReference that inspired me to actually do it. Somebody asked what everybody’s favorite YouTube helicopter videos were, and mine is, hands down, the Oh Ye of Little Faith Apache video (which you can see as part of the CRM lesson plan). That’s a pretty classic example of a CRM fail, but it doesn’t have to be so overt: consider the Bonanza video where they almost whack a mountain in IIMC.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C6bo9sz9uQ

That’s exactly the kind of scenario that will bite you in the ass. Everybody in that airplane was clinching sphincters long before they kissed that hill, but either nobody said anything or somebody didn’t listen. CRM fail.

So in the ground lessons section, I’ve placed the MRS and CRM lessons where I think they ought to be relative to each other: CRM up front, and MRS stuck somewhere in the back. I bet you can make it through your PPL without being able to list the 3 kinds of rotor systems. And I think you could tuck them into the Aerodynamics lesson somewhere in the middle of your training just fine. Weight and Balance, Weather, Performance: all more important, and things you should be doing before every flight by the time you’re hovering. I think I know why MRS is on page 1-1: it’s a starting place for establishing a common language between instructors and students so they can go on to learn the more complicated stuff. And, from a marketing standpoint, it’s better to start off saying “Today you’ll fly a helicopter with a semi-rigid rotor system, but one day you could be flying a BO-105 doing loops in with it’s rigid rotor!” than starting off by saying “You very well could die flying helicopters.” Ironically, by handling ADM/CRM the way it is handled, the chances of that are probably higher.

Thoughts on Pinnacle Landings

I had the chance to fly some last weekend, and took the opportunity to do a few pinnacle landings. The pilot who I was with has just a little more helicopter experience than I do, and quite a bit of fixed wing time. He’s done more of what I’d characterize as “real-world” flying (ie, out of the flight training pattern), and his experience shows. We picked a reconned a pinnacle just south of the airport: a nice ridge with a steep drop-off on the west face, and a smooth slope moving off to the east. The wind was blowing briskly up the face at probably 12-18 knots.

Wind is one of the factors that dictates how you approach a pinnacle. When the wind is light, the airflow is laminar (flows smoothly over the earth, following its contours). As the wind picks up, two zones that are separated by a “demarcation line” form. Above the demarcation line airflow remains laminar and smooth–good for flying in. Below the demarcation line, turbulence and eddies are going to toss the helicopter around. The method you’ll read about in the FAA Rotorcraft Flying Manual uses a steep approach that terminates right at the windward edge of the landing zone (LZ). Flying a steep approach keeps the helicopter above the demarcation line and in the smooth air. The downside of the steep approach is that it gives you fewer options in the case of trouble and, especially if you don’t plan it well, can require larger power changes. Also, as the wind picks up, your approach has to become increasingly steeper to stay above the demarcation line.

The alternative to flying a steep approach is to use a shallow approach. I’ll add a disclaimer right here that you shouldn’t try anything I’m suggesting–find an instructor who knows what he’s doing and have him show you. A shallow approach offers a few benefits that I might elaborate on at some point, but one key advantage is that you fly the approach so you don’t have to fool with trying to stay above turbulent air behind the LZ. In this instance, we could fly the helicopter along the face of the ridgeline, taking advantage of updrafts there while keeping a convenient escape route down the face. So here’s how I [tried to] fly it. Both my high and low recons were elongated ovals, with the high recon passing just over and to the east of the knob that we were going to land on. On the low recon, I descended to just above the LZ, flying the helicopter parallel to the face of the ridgeline. The final approach phase was right along the cusp of the of the pinnacle face. The entire approach is lower, and it’s set up to be a shallow descent that terminates right at the LZ. One key feature of flying this approach is that you start with the wind perpendicular to your flight path. As you slow, you still need to align with the wind to stay in trim, so you are moving along the ridgeline laterally as you approach the LZ. Since you never move behind the LZ, the helicopter never enters the turbulent airflow there.

For the record, I haven’t flown much in the last 6 months, and the Schweizer 269A is still a strange helicopter to me (different sight picture, higher skid height, no governor). The results weren’t as nice as I’d planned it in my mind: mostly, I flew it too low and started the approach too soon, so that I ended up moving over the ground sideways and lower for a lot longer than I’d have liked. In theory though, flying the approach like this has it’s benefits–for example, we were above ETL throughout the approach, right up until the point where we came to a hover.

The other pilot took the helicopter and demonstrated how he would have flown it. Not only did he execute his plan much better than I did mine, but his approach had some advantages that I hadn’t considered. Basically it was a hybrid between the steep and shallow approach techniques. He flew the approach pattern the same as I did, but a bit higher. As he lined up on final, he started a shallow descent as if he was shooting past the LZ. Once he intercepted a steep approach sight picture though, he flew that profile to the LZ. The steep portion was about what you’d do at the termination of a quick stop…or maybe about how you’d fly into a confined. His result was exactly the same, but kept us up at a much more comfortable altitude until the very end of the approach. That extra altitude makes it easier to exercise the option of breaking off the approach and flying down and away from the pinnacle face. One of his (well-justified) complaints with my approach was the risk of catching a skid while moving laterally along the face of the pinnacle–even if I’d flown it at the altitude I wanted to, I was still lower for a longer portion of the approach…my approach looked a lot like what a shallow approach to a runway would look like. Some unlucky combination of a change in wind, the lateral flight path, and an unseen obstruction would have ended my approach very badly.

Off-airport landings are something I think a lot about since confined and pinnacle landings are the mission profile for many helicopter operations. No two are the same, and getting your head wrapped around off-airport landings is tough to do in 200 hrs. Even though I’ve read up on different methods, taken a mountain flying ground course, and spent a good bit of time during my training to try different techniques, I recognize that I still have tons to learn. I’m in no position to be saying what the optimal approach is, but I liked the shallow-to-steep method.

The 60:1 Rule

No I’m not talking about the number of students who go through helicopter flight school for every instructor that gets hired. Actually, there are several problems on the Commercial Helicopter Pilot Knowledge Test that require you to understand this rule. In short, the 60:1 rule refers to the relationship between distance from a VOR or ADF station and the ground distance of 1 radial. At 60 NM from a station, if you cross 1 radial you will have covered 1 NM of ground. There are some things you need to do, like maintaining a constant heading, knowing your true airspeed, and timing how long it takes for you to cross the radials, but that’s the premise of this problem.

When I went through my commercial ticket, this was a stumbling block for me, and it took me a while to figure it out. I’m not mathematically inclined–1 of the 3 C’s I got in college was in calculus II, and the only thing I remember from that class was that the instructor wore the exact same sweater to class every single day. Yep, true story. Anyway, a friend recently asked me to endorse him for his CPL(H) knowledge test. Before I offered him an endorsement, I asked him to do several knowledge tests and he also hit a wall with these questions. Smart guy too–went to grad school, has his A&P, Inspector Authorization, and rebuilds helicopters for fun. Fact is, the 60:1 rule questions aren’t hard–they are very easy. Why is it that they cause trouble?

Like anything else, you and I can only teach what we’ve been taught, and the 60:1 rule isn’t taught well in any of the helicopter textbooks or the Jeppesen Commercial/Instrument Handbook (which I think is a waste of 0.3 flight hours’ cash). Since you only need it to pass the Commercial and CFI written exams, why not just memorize the answers and move on?

Yeah, you could do that. But I’m guessing that the instructors and students who read this blog are setting a higher standard for themselves. I was disappointed when my instructors glossed over questions or didn’t know things that I knew. Like you, my mission is to raise the bar a little so the next generation of students is a little better trained than I was. So here’s my lesson plan for teaching the 60:1 rule, along with a short animated graphic to help out those of you who like to see concepts illustrated. The animation takes about 30 seconds to run, and I’ll admit that it’s not going to dazzle anybody, but it does more to explain the application of the 60:1 rule than the spiffy graphics in the Jeppesen book does. Now you can impress your students, other instructors, and your friends with your command of this archaic piece of trivia!

Putting TFA's Lessons to Practice

I thought this would just be a 1-off topic, but as I’ve thought about it, there’s a lot you should be considering when looking for an instructor. In the first part, I said that your instructor is going to be the most important variable in the quality of your helicopter training. In the second part, I pointed out how challenging it is to separate the good instructors from the bad, since most have big aspirations and little teaching experience. That post talks about the qualities and attributes that predict who will make a good CFI. The purpose of this post is to give you some pointers on how to apply the lessons from the first 2 posts to the real world.

First, find out if the school has a selective process for hiring their flight instructors. Ask the school’s owner what their selection criteria are. Take this example of 2 schools up in the Northwest: the first posts job ads, requests resumes, and has a review and interview process. I haven’t been through it–and it might all be bullshit–but at least it’s a formal process for validating what the chief pilot might already know about a prospective CFI (and maybe learning some things he didn’t know). At the other school, instructors are just hired. The owner doesn’t ask for resumes and there are no interviews. Who gets through is based more on the school’s immediate needs, when they graduated, and who the current CFIs recommend (and what are their criteria…?). There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with that system, but does the owner really know what they’re getting? Sooo….

Ask the owner what their flight instructors’ individual qualifications are. If you get a generic answer and nothing deeper (“Well, we look for professionalism, good skills in the helicopter, good attitude, and they have to be good teachers…”), but the owner can’t say, “Well, Bob did XYZ before flying helicopters, and during her CFI training, Sally stood out from the other candidates by…”, then you’re dealing with a flight school that isn’t hiring instructors based on the ability to be good instructors. Does the owner (or chief pilot) relate examples to you that illustrate the attributes that predict who will be a good flight instructor?

Get to know your instructor too, before you sign up. Ask her if she has any prior teaching experience, what she did before flying, what her greatest non-aviation accomplishments are. By the time you complete your training, you’ll probably get to know all these things through the course of friendly conversation, but it doesn’t help you then.

When you do your demo ride, see if the instructor is using the “I do, we do, you do” method, or if he just hands over the helicopter after briefly demonstrating a control’s effect. If that’s what he does (and most will, because a demo ride is really about getting you excited about flying a helicopter), ask him if he uses the “Telling-and-Doing” technique of flight instruction. Every CFI has to know about this method, and the good ones will have learned to put that info into practice (as opposed to just memorizing it for the check ride). You might be impressed if the instructor says he actually prefers the Demonstration and Performance method, but the Telling-and-Doing technique is an extension of the D&P method. They aren’t the same, and the most important distinction is that the “student tells, instructor does” transition. There’s a whole freaking chapter on this in the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook, aka The Fundamentals of Instruction or FAA-H-8083-9, so it’s gotta be pretty important! If you don’t believe me, drop me an email and I’ll send you a copy of the FOI with the key paragraph highlighted.

Most students won’t do any of this–they’re too excited about the dream of being a helicopter pilot, and aren’t going to start thinking about their career until some time down the road. Big mistake. Be rational about your demo ride. Almost everybody is too excited or too nervous to make a demo ride meaningful. Consider doing a no-pressure demo ride just for the hell of it, then doing a one-off, honest-to-god lesson that includes a complete ground and flight portion (and the 2 ought to relate to each other…but that’s another topic).

Finding a Good Flight Instructor

Second installment in a two-part stream of consciousness. Here’s the first part if you didn’t read it already, but if you want the short-attention span version, basically I was talking about some of the attributes good instructors have. This part is more relevant to the wannabe helicopter pilot: How can I tell if I’m getting a good instructor?

“I’m confused…isn’t this the same thing you were talking about in the first part?” Nope. Here’s why.

Helicopter flight instructors usually don’t teach for too long–CFI is usually considered a stepping stone to a “real job”. If you get a seasoned instructor in the helicopter industry, you’re probably only his 4th or 5th student. That’s not a lot of time to figure out how to be an effective instructor, even for the most motivated CFI. So when you’re on that demo ride with a bright and smiling 200-hr CFI, how can you sort out if he’s going to bumble through his next 1000 hrs of dual, leaving a wake of confused students, or whether he’s going to figure out how to teach you what you need to know to be a proficient pilot? This part, also based on research done by Teach for America, might be some help. And, maybe, flight schools can take TFA’s findings to heart when they are making hiring decisions.

Attitude is everything in the helicopter industry. Even if you haven’t even learned how to hover, you’ve probably already heard this pearl of wisdom. This part is true: a good attitude will open doors for you and get you through the tough times. But good instructors have more than a good attitude: they have a track-record for perseverance. Effective instructors have demonstrated that they can pursue and follow-through on long-term goals. Simply saying “all I ever wanted to be was a helicopter pilot” and keeping a positive attitude about attaining that goal through the hard times isn’t good enough. An instructor that has successfully completed college or built a business has demonstrated perseverance. An instructor that spent years getting his ratings might be a better choice than the good stick who was in the right place at the right time.

Reevaluation and continuous improvement is another predictor of a good instructor. Again, given the short tenure for helicopter flight instructors, it might be hard to evaluate whether your instructor can constantly reassess his effectiveness and improve his teaching method since even the most experienced ones won’t have been at it too long. One way you can judge this attribute is by asking about their past academic performance or work experience. In this case, the better instructor is the one who might have started off as average but improved over time–not the brainiac who always got straight As or the slacker who never moved from the sales floor to a management position. The instructors that had to work and improve in other endeavors are more likely to apply the same process of reevaluation and improvement as helicopter flight instructors.

Not all helicopter flight instructors have a college degree to point at, but don’t think that means you don’t have other ways of looking at their ability to reevaluate and improve. Try looking at leadership performance. This is more for flight schools than students, but have your instructors taken charge of a project, seen it through to the end, and had some tangible results to show for it all in the end? For example, when I’m reviewing resumes from low-time pilots, I always ask the older guys if they’ve had a business or management experience—that’s leadership performance. Employers want to know this because it tells them about the applicant’s capacity for self-improvement, and this is something every student and flight school should be looking for from their instructors.

Good instructors also apply the “I do, we do, you do” model. This is covered in the FOI, but you really need to put it in practice as an instructor because it works. Every instructor I’ve flown with has skipped the “we do” part (and students are complicit in this–they want to get on the controls rather than sitting and watching). This takes some creativity, and there’s no resource that provides any guidance for a motivated instructor trying to figure out the “we do” part for individual maneuvers. But here are a couple of examples I thought of:

Hovering: “Tell me when you see the helicopter starting to drift, and tell me what to do…left cyclic, right cyclic, forward, backward…”
Approaches: “Am I high or low, fast or slow? What’s the corrective action?”
“Quick” stops: “You tell me how to do the maneuver.” (“Level, lower, pedal, aft…flare, flare, flare…level, power”, for example.)
Autorotations: “Tell me how to correct any deviations from our glide configuration”, “Tell me when to initiate the flare and add power.”

This method keeps students from learning bad habits because they don’t understand the underlying concepts or steps. Primacy also plays into this–the first time a student does something makes an impression, and if that first time included incorrect inputs, they now have to unlearn them before they can learn the correct ones.

Good instructors also recognize that students aren’t very good at evaluating their understanding. This tears at the method of assessing students’ understanding by ending every lesson by asking “Do you have any questions?” According to TFA, students may think they understand, but if actually challenged to demonstrate their understanding, they can’t do it. An instructor who merely relies on student self-assessment to judge teaching efficacy isn’t collecting the info he needs to really evaluate whether his teaching methods are effective. (And recall questions like “What maintenance can a private pilot perform on his helicopter?” don’t test understanding–they only test memorization.) Even if students are saying they understand the lesson, or they’re getting recall questions correct, they probably aren’t making the deeper connections that will allow them to apply that information in the helicopter.

In the first part, I also said some of TFA’s findings also apply beyond the flight school environment and into your career as a helicopter pilot. Many of the qualities that make a good instructor are also the same things employers like to see on a resume. When I talked about how a college degree can give you an edge, it’s not about the knowledge you’ve gained, but it’s demonstrating your good attitude backed by a track record for perseverance. Recurrent training: additional education beyond the minimums might demonstrate that you are willing to make the effort to improve your skills above the minimum requirements. And the reason you list accomplishments under your job title on your resume is to show that you can take charge, follow a project through, and walk away at the end with some sort of tangible result.

One last thing TFA might be able to teach you. There are some things that we think make somebody a good helicopter flight instructor, but ultimately they don’t matter. Charisma. Ambition, whether they know where they want to be and have the drive to get there, or whether they have grand plans for where they want their students to be. Extroversion. In the end, a smile and a good attitude is useless without knowledge, perseverance, practice, and improvement. This is important, because when we go shopping–whether it’s for dinner, a new car, or a flight instructor–most of us are going to go with the person who sells himself rather than the person who can actually deliver on their promises.

Knowledge Test Fee Increase

The CATS/LaserGrade cartel is going to be upping their fees for the required knowledge tests come March (or April, nobody seems to know). The most remarkable thing is the magnitude of the increase…$50 per test. Over the course of your helicopter training, the knowledge tests are going to cost you the same as about 4 hours of dual instruction. Ouch!

What Makes a "Good Instructor"

Whenever a prospective student starts looking for schools, one thing that consistently comes up is that they want “good instructors.” But what actually makes a good instructor? Can there really be good instructors in an industry where most CFIs view their jobs as transient? Where schools show instructors the door when they hit 1000 hrs, if they haven’t already gotten a “real job” lined up? Are there only better and worse instructors? Could you spot a good instructor if you met one?

I was reading about Teach for America this week–this is a non-profit agency that recruits college grads to volunteer to teach elementary or high school students for 2 years. They’ve taken to studying their recruits, assessing their performance, and then trying to figure out what traits can be used to predict an effective teacher. Some of what Teach for America has figured out might help you when you’re looking at schools, and overall, there are some lessons that apply to your career. First and foremost, TFA has found that, while the school is important, it’s really the instructor that makes the difference in the student’s experience. The quality of instructors in a single school varies dramatically though. If you click with an instructor on a demo flight, make sure they’re going to be there for the duration of your training, and that they actually have room available in their schedule. High-time instructors are often getting ready to leave, especially if the spring hiring season is coming and they already have the hours they need for a turbine job. There are also a few schools that lay-off their high-time instructors to make room for low-time pilots so they can build time.

But TFA also found that knowledge is not everything! Simply having more hours doesn’t necessarily mean that an instructor will be successful. When TFA looked at what qualities their most successful instructors had, they found that they:

Set big goals for their students;
Acted purposefully so that every one of their actions related back to their overall goal;
Were always reevaluating their performance and improving their methods;
Planned and prepared, and changed those plans based on the results they were getting.

For flight instructors, how might these apply? Well, the first is pretty easily measured: instead of aiming for the 80% passing rate they need to renew their certificate, maybe >95% on the written exams and 100% pass rate on check rides would be a better threshold. Of course, simply setting that goal isn’t sufficient…they have to follow through with that second element. This one’s tough for the flight maneuvers since an instructor can’t just follow a lesson plan; some students will progress slower or faster than others. In addition, repeatedly hammering the same maneuver over and over again isn’t necessarily the best method for perfecting it. For both ground and practical maneuvers, there should be a logical progression built into the lesson plans. For example, instead of:

Lesson 4: Regulations (60 minutes)

Part 41
Part 61
Part 91
NTSB 830

A syllabus that builds knowledge would integrate each of the regulations into other lessons, so students could correlate the regulation with the actual procedures that they execute during their flights. So maybe Part 41 would be taught in this lesson:

Lesson X: Pre-flight Airworthiness and Maintenance Checks (60 minutes)

Maintenance and engine logs
Squawk sheets
Pre-flight inspection
etc…

I’m just throwing this out there. To really cover the regs, there wouldn’t be a Part 91 lesson, but instead one where instructors, say, discuss the airspace requirements for the airport they’re about to fly into (rather than drawing the diagram that lumps them all together and reciting the 3-5-1-2 mantra–even though I have that very diagram in my lesson plans).

Reevaluating and improving only makes sense–as pilots, we’re already doing this constantly in the cockpit. But it’s a hard one to judge when you’re testing out flight instructors. And if your flight instructor only has 5 or 6 students during his 1000-hr tenure, he doesn’t have much of a chance to make improvements. That makes the planning and preparation phase more important. During your CFI training, you should develop lesson plans and practice presenting them. This is good. As a student, you should be able to tell that your instructor has practiced teaching each lesson recently. It’s not so good if your instructor sits down in front of you, then lays out the syllabus and the Rotorcraft Flying Manual and starts asking questions.

With that, I’m officially making this a 2-part entry. Since I’m at HAI for the Flight Instructor Refresher Clinic, it might be a week or 2.

Radio Navigation

The basic model for flight schools is to get students to take their CFII right after their CFI. This makes sense for the school for a few reasons, but in the long run, it ends up costing students. The school’s reasoning is that a CFII is a more marketable job candidate than a CFI, and that CFIIs are more likely to get hired. When schools do hire from the outside, they also subscribe to this rationale. Personally, I’d rather spend my CFII training where I’d be teaching, and it wouldn’t hurt to have that actual flight time to familiarize a new instructor with the school’s SOPs and the environment, but that’s the way the industry works. As a prospective instructor, you’ll have to buy into this logic and finish your CFII before you start looking for work.

Here’s the downside that I see: R22 instrument trainers are in short supply and have a more restrictive CG envelope (from what I hear anyway–I’ve only seen 1, and it was a glass cockpit trainer). Because of this, many schools rely on the R44 for instrument and CFII training. No problem there. But, insurance companies aren’t thrilled about low-time CFIIs instructing in R44s, and at least some of them will stick a 500 hr TT restriction on their policies. There are, of course, exceptions and ways schools can get around this, but if your school uses an R44, find out.

Why does this matter? A CFII operating in this system will fly for several months before he’s at 500 hrs TT and cleared to teach in the R44. All that time, he won’t have given a moment’s thought to instrument flight or procedures, and the teaching methods he learned to pass his CFII check ride will be fuzzy memories. Depending on your school, he may not be IFR current, and his R44 time in the last 60 days may only be 1-2 hrs. Even if you land a CFII that’s close to his 1000 hrs and has been teaching IFR for a while, at best, he’s probably only taken 3-5 students through their instrument rating–not much practice, considering the amount of knowledge that has to be learned during the instrument rating. So, if your school was anything like the school I went to, any instructor you get will be struggling to remember how to fly IFR and to develop effective teaching methods. As his student, you’ll be paying for your instructor to get up to speed.

The best thing for students would be for schools to offer CFII training only once their instructors have the aeronautical experience they need to perform the duties of a CFII. This won’t happen, since there’s an economic incentive for schools to take every student as far along in their training as they can before the student runs out of money or leaves to teach somewhere else. As a student, you can reduce the cost and time you need for your instrument rating by learning as much as you can at home. Obviously you can do more ground training at home. I’d recommend ditching the Jeppesen Instrument/Commercial textbook altogether, and using the FAA Instrument Procedures Handbook as a back-up source. For books, I personally liked Instrument Flying by Richard Taylor. I picked up the 4th edition for less than it cost the seller to ship it to me. A book like this is pretty worthless for learning regs, and I think he still had a section on the recently decommissioned LORAN network. But he provides a common sense, practical approach to learning instrument procedures based on the experience that your instructor just doesn’t have. I’m not saying you should run out and by that book, but look into some of the video programs and books that are out there. Go over to your local fixed wing flight school, talk to one of their 2000-hr part-time instructors, and ask him what his recommendations are (when I finally did this, the FW instructor slapped his forehead when I told him all I was using was the FAA books).

You can also sit on your couch and learn the skills you’d be paying almost $500/hr for in the cockpit. That was the spirit behind this lesson on how to use Tim’s VOR Simulator, but I know that others before me have done a better job explaining radio navigation, so I didn’t want to duplicate effort there. And here’s one of those others, doing a lecture on VOR Basics. This is a very clear and organized lesson from a well-spoken and well-prepared instructor–I didn’t hear an Ummm… or Uhhhh… in the whole lesson, which gives you an idea of how much forethought went into his presentation.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZljYaHXvxY

When the Other Shoe Drops

Several friends and I got some bad news last week. The school that we went to contacted the 8 of us that finished our CFIs over a year ago to tell us that they would not be hiring any of us, and would only be considering more recent CFI graduates. The news hit us pretty hard, but I knew this was coming. The market is flooded with CFIs and schools are still training new ones up. At the same time, Sallie Mae has pretty much stopped lending to flight students. This has been a 1-2 punch to the CFI market. As the supply of CFIs has increased, the supply of students with financing–and therefore the demand for CFIs–has collapsed. This isn’t even considering the trouble 1000-hr CFIs are having finding jobs. Some schools have resorted to firing 1000-hr CFIs to artificially inflate the demand for their low-time CFIs. Other schools are keeping their CFIs on longer. Somebody loses in either scenario.

Even though the school I went to routinely hired guys who had been out for >6 months, I think they’ve reach the point where they have so many CFIs looking for work that they had to start cutting some of us off. They laid off two 1000-hr instructors and didn’t replace them, and the school is still having trouble filling their schedule. There just aren’t enough students out there who can get the money to start training. This is an industry-wide problem, and contraction in the flight instruction market is going to continue for a while.

For those of us who didn’t get a job right out of school, this is probably where our aviation careers will end. Even though I’ve spent the time furthering my education in other ways (like taking HAI courses), our cockpit skills have been slowly degrading. A good student and pilot who hasn’t flown much in the last year stands no chance against even a marginal student who just got his certificate and whose skills are sharp. That’s what it means when an old timer tells you that timing is everything in this industry.The tragedy for 2 of my friends is that both had 6-month breaks in their training (one for an instructor he wasn’t progressing with, and the other to take a job to save up for her Commercial and CFI tickets). In all probability, they’d at least be at 1000 hrs now.

This is also a harbinger for the future. Everybody that I’ve talked to in the industry has been saying that Sallie Mae is very reluctant to start lending again. As long as that’s the case, the flight instruction industry is going to be reliant on money from the VA and GI Bill, and from foreign students or students who have saved up enough on their own. This is a small slice of the student pie compared to what flight schools were getting from Sallie Mae and other lenders several years ago. Schools that can’t tap those other student pools are going to fail, and they’ll be dumping their medium-time CFIs onto the market. When schools start hiring again, their CFIs that just recently finished will be first in line, and those medium-time CFIs from failed schools are going to be the next most attractive candidates. You can see this in the few advertised CFI jobs–the ones that are out there are asking for a minimum of 500 hrs TT.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do. At the Vegas career seminar 2 years ago, I talked to BoatPix but didn’t follow up on it thinking that I’d make the cut and get hired at my school. My timing couldn’t be worse: Silverstate had just failed, and I graduated right after 6 other students; 2 of them had just gotten hired. It was months before any of the other instructors got jobs and left, and 2 that left weren’t replaced. Especially in this economy, getting hired by another school is an improbable event, and last year at HAI half the schools I talked to wouldn’t even take a resume from me (I’m sure the others pitched my resumes before they left the building). BoatPix is now also swamped with CFIs who got on before the economy crashed. That leaves me with approximately zero options for now.