I’m sitting around, trying to figure out how I’m going to get from 246 hours of helicopter time to 1000 hours. Networking has never been my strong suite, and I don’t have anybody who’s willing to mentor me through this phase. That means I need to be a flight instructor. For me, personally, this is no problem. Flying is a second career for me, I’ve taught before, and I think it’s great fun and rewarding. Right now though there are 13.2 million CFIs out there, some of who just finished their CFI yesterday. I need a way to stay sharp, and if I’m not working or working on a rating, I just can’t keep up.
I thought I would expand on my otherwise basic lesson plans, and in doing so I came up with an idea. Since I’m on VerticalReference every day, and there are many knowledgeable pilots there, why not draw them in? So I put this post up: Teaching Techniques: Hovering. I thought this could evolve into a great series–the “Teaching Techniques” tag could be a search term that anybody could go back and look at in the future. I thought there’d be enough idle CFIs that it’d get a lot of comments. I even committed to updating the first post based on the comments.
By the time the topic was dead, it got a disappointing 14 comments (3 of them were mine). Hopefully that isn’t foreshadowing…. But it has over 1800 views, which is 2-6 times the views that other posts in the Flight Training forum get. I thought the outcome was pretty useful, although it took me processing people’s experiences and drawing a lot from conversations I had. In the end, I didn’t think it was successful enough to warrant a follow-up.
Well, I came back to the idea after looking into a WordPress blog for another project. Since that project didn’t pan out, I now have time to work on this one. Anyway, check out About Wiki RFM if you want to know why I think this is a good idea and how it works. If you agree that it’s worth it, contribute once I start adding content! Otherwise I’ll just let it join the rest of the electronic jetsam that’s drifting out there. If it takes off, even a little bit, I’ll figure more out about how it should work.