By Sophia Lafontaine, EAA 1601398
Sometimes, I wonder how I could have made my private pilot training go by faster. While the length of your flight training is dependent on many factors, such as natural ability, affordability, and weather, I think that there are ways that every student pilot, regardless of their ability or circumstances, can increase what they get out of a flight lesson. It took thousands of dollars and over 80 hours before I was ready to schedule my checkride, and, looking back, some of those hours included time having to go over things that I could have practiced on the ground. Thus, I think that both numbers could have been a lot lower had I taken some of the steps that I’m about to share below.
Chair flying is important, but you need to do it properly. One of the reasons why chair flying is so important is that it allows student pilots to direct more focus toward skills and tasks that they struggle to execute when flying. This can be anything and everything from a specific radio call to an entire flight portion of a checkride. When you are chair flying, you get to decide where to challenge yourself. I found that going through the whole flight isn’t always necessary. In fact, a session that thoroughly targets a specific area of flight is often more useful. Proper chair flying can take a long time, so working on specific “chunks” of flight prevents mental fatigue. Now, this is an important point — proper chair flying should take time. You should try to make the conditions as realistic as possible (more on this later).
Additionally, I often found myself questioning or having to look up a lot of things, especially as a new pilot. This is one of the main reasons why chair flying is so important! If you are, say, practicing your arrival to a nontowered airport, and you forget how far out to make your first call, you shouldn’t skip over this step. A chair flying session is like a YouTube video; you can — and should — put it on pause, go look up what you don’t know, write it down somewhere, and then go back to the session, implementing what you’ve just learned. If I left questions unanswered during my chair flying sessions, I almost always faced the exact same unanswered question when I was actually flying. The air is not the place to be questioning how far out you should make that first radio call! Making my mistakes on the ground allowed me to learn without consequences in a calm, focused environment, and it helped the actual flight go as smoothly as possible! Now, back to the YouTube video analogy. Not only can you pause the video, but you can also replay the video if you missed something. If, when visualizing flying to this nontowered airport, you forget to make that first call altogether, don’t continue the “flight.” Go back to when you were 10 miles out and simulate the call.
Practice can be just as harmful if you don’t do it right. A lazy chair flying session reinforces bad habits. You might as well have not flown at all! In fact, if you are too tired to chair fly, learning to recognize this, and maybe deciding not to chair fly until you’ve gotten some rest, translates to better aeronautical decision-making when actually flying. If you’re too tired to chair fly properly, you’re too tired to fly at all and should prioritize rest and recovery.
Use free resources to make your chair flight as real as possible. While many pilots now have EFBs like ForeFlight that make flight planning easy and efficient, this might not be the case for new student pilots. I know that I ran into this problem frequently, as I trained in a little old Cessna 150 with no glass panel avionics or GPS. I also didn’t have any sort of tablet and did all of my cross-country flights with only paper charts to reference. Fortunately, there are easy, low-cost alternatives that helped me a lot with flight planning and chair flying. Google Maps, for example, is great for identifying landmarks along your route. It also has a “measure distance” feature. I found this helpful for choosing a landmark to make my call from when arriving or departing from an airport. The problem with only using a sectional chart is that it can be easy to pick landmarks that you can’t actually see from the air. When I plan my cross-country flights, I always go over my route in Google Maps to see if I have picked effective landmarks. This allows me to make corrections on the ground. Google Earth is also a great option for this. Google Earth is even more realistic because you can view the landscape in 3D, as opposed to the top-down view in Google Maps.
Finally, LiveATC.net is a good free resource to hone communication skills. When chair flying, I often tune into my local airport’s ATIS frequency — again, trying to make the chair flight environment as realistic as possible. While its use is limited (most of the data is either unavailable or archived, especially at smaller airports), if you can find a busy CTAF frequency, just listening to it for a little while and trying to make sense of what’s going on is a great way to practice situational awareness on the radio.
It is easy to get behind the airplane when you are new, so it is important to develop strong, thorough flight planning skills. Student pilots often find themselves forgetting radio calls, deviating from their targeted altitude and airspeed, and struggling to remain aware of their surroundings as they try to keep the airplane under control. We’ve all heard the term, “Aviate, Navigate, and Communicate,” which can help us prioritize what needs to be done in the moment, but, usually, all three of these need to be done at some point. If a pilot is lacking skill in any one of these areas, it becomes easy for one of two things to happen: One, the pilot skips over the area because they don’t know how to do it. For example, someone who struggles with radio calls might choose not to announce their position on the CTAF when arriving at a nontowered field. Or, more likely, the pilot spends too much time on one area because they do not know how to do it well, leaving less room for the other two areas. A pilot who has not chosen great landmarks on their cross-country flight might spend so long staring at the ground, trying to figure out where they are, that they don’t realize they’ve just gained 500 feet of altitude, or that they are crossing into towered airspace and haven’t made a radio call.
New pilots often struggle in all three of these areas as they learn how to do them properly. This almost always results in the pilot getting behind the airplane, which compromises the safety of flight. This is why I suggest taking some time during your flight planning to practice each skill separately. If you are planning a cross-country flight, and you know that you’ll be arriving at a towered airport, write down the ATIS and tower/approach frequencies. Then, since you need to have ATIS before making your initial call to approach/tower, pick a specific point during your flight when you tune into the ATIS (the earlier, the better!). Ideally, you choose a prominent landmark at a set distance from the airport. After you have received ATIS, you then might practice making your radio call. Practice the entire call: “X tower, aircraft X is X miles to the X cardinal direction at X altitude with information X, would like to do X.” This is an example of how one can practice their communication skills when on the ground, which can prevent them from struggling to remember what to say on the radio while trying to manage the airplane during a busy phase of flight.
Write everything down. It is a well-known fact that writing down what you have learned greatly increases the chances that you’ll remember it. You should do this after your lessons, as it can be very difficult to internalize what an instructor is saying to you when you’re trying to fly the airplane. Ideally, you do it as soon as possible while everything is still fresh in your mind. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy — just grab a notebook, write the date of the lesson, and write whatever comes to mind. I often find that, as I start writing about one thing that I learned, other, smaller pieces of knowledge that I might not have remembered otherwise also start to come back to me. Also, be sure to write down your mistakes! It is common to develop bad habits when first learning to fly — writing them down helps you remember not to do them the next time you go flying! It also helps you develop effective chair-flying sessions because you can make a point to factor in your bad habits.
Learn to ask questions instead of becoming compliant with routines. Flight training taught me a lot of routines. Routines, I found, work well for implementing foundational skills, but, alone, they will not teach you how to adapt to new or changing situations. And a good pilot is an adaptable pilot, one who knows how and when to question what could be instead of always blindly accepting what is. You need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing because compliance can get pilots into serious trouble. For example, when I was doing pattern work at my home airport early on in my training, my instructor had me turn crosswind at 700 feet IALT. Of course, I ran into some trouble once I started my cross-country training at airports with different terrain, field elevation, and pattern altitudes. I finally asked myself: Why was I taught to turn crosswind at 700 feet? I took the time to research this, and learned that the standard practice is to turn crosswind at 300 feet below pattern altitude. Of course, this is not an end-all, be-all rule, but now that I had this guideline, it was much easier for me to adjust my pattern when flying to new airports. Case in point, the real learning did not happen until I took what knowledge I had gained from the lesson and tried to make sense of it. Being able to do this — ask why — is a sign that you’re taking steps toward developing your skills as a pilot.
When I learned to do all of this, I found that I was more prepared, my lessons went a lot smoother, and my performance in the air improved. Unfortunately, I didn’t do many of these things, such as properly chair flying on a regular basis, until later on in my flight training. I don’t think I realized just how prepared I needed to be for every flight until closer to my checkride, when it became very real to me that there was not always going to be an instructor to pick up my slack. It was also a time and a money thing — I did most of my flight training during my junior year of high school, which is notoriously known for being the busiest and most difficult school year. Additionally, the amount of money I was spending on flight training did not get any smaller, especially after I transitioned to a bigger, more expensive airplane. I realized that I had limited time and money, and it wasn’t enough to just attend flight lessons anymore. I had to make the most out of the time and money I put toward flying. After I got my private pilot certificate, an instructor who was checking me out in a new airplane said something to me that stuck. “My job as the instructor is to make sure you’re doing what you need to fly the airplane properly, and your goal as the student is to get me to shut up.” When this happens, you know that you’ve made the most out of your time in the air.
