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Why has flight training gone assbackwards?

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Why has flight training gone assbackwards?

Old 7th Mar 2014, 20:32
  #81 (permalink)  
 
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I soloed on gliders, as a teen, then did a 30 hour PPL on no-radio Jackeroos (Tiger Moth convertion) at age 23, at Thruxton. After letting my license lapse, due to expence. I re-did it on C152s at age 46, at Inverness.
The airspace in the Thruxton area has changed since 1964.
Although almost all my flying since January 1990 is wood-and-fabric taildragger (Jodel DR1050), I doubt if any taildragger would be an economic trainer at Inverness. The tarmac runways and wind strengths would rule it out.
And the more stable aircraft are much less affected by turbulence.
A school must provide students with as little weather downtime as possible.

I like the C150/152, but don't like the 172. However my few hours on the C172 include the highest winds and the worst weather I have continued my flight through, without thinking of diverting. The high wing gives it a sideways vision advantage in heavy rain over the Pa28 (which is a very stable aircraft).
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Old 7th Mar 2014, 21:18
  #82 (permalink)  
 
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Chuck, are you Richard Bach in disguise, by any chance? !

...if we structured flying training like the education system is structured.

Kindergarten would be held in a farmers grass field and the school room would be a Cub, once the student mastered the Cub to solo they would then enter grade school....
Your sentiments are so redolent of Bach's, as expressed in a short story "School for Perfection" published in "A Gift of Wings".

Reading that book as a teenager contributed a lot to my lifelong interest in aviation.

FBW
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Old 7th Mar 2014, 21:25
  #83 (permalink)  
 
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a number of modern pilots are not interested in tailwheel aircraft because they sometimes appear to me to be a little afraid of the perceived difficulty in handling
It's not "afraid", it's "why would I bother to spend scare money and flying time on something that's reputed to be more difficult, and is then going to be smaller and slower and without sufficient gizmos for effortless navigation?"

Anyway, all this silly squabbling about which end the wheel should be - real aeroplanes don't have wheels.
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Old 7th Mar 2014, 21:37
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Chuck, are you Richard Bach in disguise, by any chance? !
No but we have a lot in common, his story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull was awesome, just awesome.

Have you read any the books that Ernest Gann wrote?

He was my favorite airplane story writer and I was fortunate enough to have gotten to know him personally, the last time we talked together was in his hangar in Friday Harbor where he kept his Wing Derringer and he was showing me the new strike finder he had installed in it, it was not long after that he passed away at home in Friday Harbor.
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Old 7th Mar 2014, 21:43
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Pace. Re your reply to P C, don't assume.
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Old 7th Mar 2014, 21:52
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Originally Posted by dobbin1
It is possible to teach ab initio in a SuperCub, but in my opinion, not a good idea.
I think the only bad thing about a super cub for ab initio is it has too much power. The student's first airplane should be a dog, or a glider. The PA12 was good for me.
Bryan
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Old 7th Mar 2014, 21:53
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To get a PPL you must first go to kindergarten before you enter grade school.

Kindergarten would be held in a farmers grass field and the school room would be a Cub, once the student mastered the Cub to solo they would then enter grade school....a regular flight training school where they would then be taught by rote and introduced to all the ancillary tasks such as radios, flight and engine instrument interpretation, weather and on and on until they either realized they were being screwed or they go broke.
Johnm:

In all fairness to you I agree we can agree to disagree.....

So please allow me to comment on your opinions.

This is almost precisely the wrong way round. Start with a PA 28 or a 172 or some other half way sensible but cheap aeroplane which is easy to fly.
The Cub is easy to fly.

As soon as the pupil can land reliably send them solo and then teach radio, GPS and all the other bits that make travelling in a light aeroplane practical.
Radio and GPS can be taught without any airplane being needed, period.

Thereafter you can do advanced things like flying old aeroplanes that are hard to fly and aerobatics and so forth.
Obviously your vision of what an advanced airplane is and my understanding of an advanced airplane are diametrically different.

I learned to fly on tail wheel airplanes in 1953, they were basic trainers and they produced competent pilots in the same general time frame today's pilots are trained in modern basic nose wheel airplanes.

To me advanced airplanes were the ones I finished my career on which were modern glass cockpit airliners.
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Old 7th Mar 2014, 22:54
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It was Richard Bach's 'A Gift of Wings' that inspired me to get my licence. Wasn't too impressed by 'Johnathan', though.
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Old 7th Mar 2014, 23:25
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Chuck

It takes a special kind of imagination to understand JLS Chuck. Always nice to see!


MJ
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 13:46
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I think life is getting too complicated so people prefer things to be simple and easily accessible. The driving comparison was spot on. Modern cars can be thrown into corners, you can stamp on the brakes and you don't even need to know how to check oil levels or how to change a tyre. Aviation is decades behind but it is surely progressing in the same direction with computer assisted handling (oh God you may stall) and automatics so you can relax and maybe take a much needed nap after all the stresses of everyday life.

Personally I don't much like the Cub. It flies nicely but, it's too small, hard to get in and out of, has lots of things to bang your head on and has heel brakes that anyone of reasonable human proportions can barely use. It's also slow, and has tandem seating with only one instrument panel. I can see why it's not the average pilots first choice of rental.

Somebody above mentioned that they usually see tail-dragger pilots landing nicely whereas tricycle pilots tend to find "other ways" of landing. If this is evident of a tricycle trained pilot flying in a tricycle aircraft than it is surely something that proper flight instruction on a tricycle aircraft should be able to fix. So in summary it's all the flight instructors fault! Wouldn't a higher barrier to entry for flight instruction be a better solution to assbackwardsness than using an old ass... erm errr aeroplane?
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 14:17
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Somebody above mentioned that they usually see tail-dragger pilots landing nicely whereas tricycle pilots tend to find "other ways" of landing. If this is evident of a tricycle trained pilot flying in a tricycle aircraft than it is surely something that proper flight instruction on a tricycle aircraft should be able to fix. So in summary it's all the flight instructors fault! Wouldn't a higher barrier to entry for flight instruction be a better solution to assbackwardsness than using an old ass... erm errr aeroplane?
500, you're missing something. I already made the point that a good instructor can teach correct landing technique in a nose wheel aeroplane. The problem is, nose wheel aeroplanes will (to some extent) tolerate very poor landing technique, the like of which is all too commonly seen at GA fields, because pilots (humans!) are lazy. One day, the nose leg gives up the unequal struggle (check out the huge number of noseleg collapses in AAIB accident reports each month. These incidents rarely cause injury, but they are very expensive to fix - shock loaded engine etc - and add greatly to our insurance premiums).

Tailwheel aeroplanes will not tolerate sloppy landing technique. So tail wheel pilots tend to land correctly.
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 18:00
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Tailwheel aeroplanes will not tolerate sloppy landing technique. So tail wheel pilots tend to land correctly.
That's one outcome scenario. Another would be that tailwheel aeroplanes are simply more likely to be damaged in cases where pilots (humans!) momentarily perform under par.

BTW, given that this is apparently such a "stick & rudder" topic, I am almost astonished that no one has so far mentioned the fact that according to the well-known book of the same name, it's the taildragger landing gear which is assbackwards
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 18:59
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The problem is, nose wheel aeroplanes will (to some extent) tolerate very poor landing technique, the like of which is all too commonly seen at GA fields, because pilots (humans!) are lazy.
So the simple solution is that we should all fly the most difficult aircraft we can find so we can constantly (hopefully) demonstrate our superior skills? Or aircraft manuafacturers could make the nose wheel more robust to account for the lazy bd flying it! The second option would be more in keeping with current trends.
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 19:28
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aircraft manuafacturers could make the nose wheel more robust to account for the lazy bd flying it! The second option would be more in keeping with current trends.
I suppose you could follow that route. And cover all the hills with bouncy air bags in case an errant pilot should hit one... etc.... etc....
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 20:48
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"Nose wheel aircraft will tolerate sloppy landing techniques" ? Only up to the point where the front wheel gives up.

Tailwheel aircraft can take more abuse on rough ground than nose wheels. So should be safer to train on once the basic difference in CofG has been grasped.


What is wrong with being trained to a slightly better standard than the barest minimum?
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 20:54
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What is wrong with being trained to a slightly better standard than the barest minimum?
My guess is a lot of pilots are satisfied with mediocrity because anything higher is just to difficult for them.
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 22:08
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Trouble is most of them don't see it as mediocre, they have spent loads of cash and expect to be called Captain. They carry a flight bag the size of a portacabin , to hire a 172 for an hour. How on earth do they need any more training??
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Old 8th Mar 2014, 23:44
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My guess is a lot of pilots are satisfied with mediocrity because anything higher is just to difficult for them.
You could level that at most activities though, driving being one of them. There's an element of being good enough to do something with reasonable safety and wanting to be better at something for the sake of being better at it. Personally I like to be good at what I do. It probably makes me no safer than the guy who flies once a month to the same local bacon butty place but we really have no right to criticise that. The same guy may get great pleasure from it and be as safe as houses.

It's the same as a guy who makes a table. One guy bolts four 4x4 pieces of fence post to a slab of pine. He has a table and it will stand for a hundred years. It wouldn't be the table that I would make and you or I may criticise the shoddy nature of it and lack of finesse but his would still function as a table. Same with pilots. How good do you have to be? I'm only driven to be better at something because that's my personality type I suppose. If I can put an a/c within 50' of where I want it to be I'll want to put it within 25' next time. It's not really making me any safer because I'm never going to land on a spit of gravel in the Canadian tundra, it's just my desire to be good at something. Other people are different, good enough does for them.
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Old 9th Mar 2014, 00:46
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Speaking for myself and probably a fair few other people, I get about 1 day a month when, if the weather is good, I can go flying. I can afford about 2 hours. The weather isn't always good. I often don't go out for a few months. I hope things get easier in the future - I have plans for a Luciole (taildragger) - but in the meanwhile it's nice to fly something that is reasonably forgiving and doesn't require hundreds of hours a year in order to remain acceptably safe.
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Old 9th Mar 2014, 10:03
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I have plans for a Luciole (taildragger)
Well, I hope it flies better than the WW1 Luciole. Was it in 'Gift of Wings' where the film pilot flying the replica WW1 Luciole said of it "it's a very fine Luciole, but it will never be an aeroplane".
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