Good question Bob.
For me “airmanship” means the cerebral skills (+knowledge & attitudes) and behaviours of an aircrew member, “handling” being the manual counterpart. Of course, there is good and poor airmanship.
In teaching commercial pilots, it is airmanship which presents the greatest challenge, carries the greatest importance, and is least well and structurally taught. Every FI in the country can teach S&L 1, because our system of training FIs equips them with a framework to deal with the basic exercises and our system of examination repeatedly ensures they can reproduce it. However, generally an FI is on his or her own when it comes to developing a ‘system’ for teaching airmanship. As a result, many are not skilled and the majority resort to ad-hoc airmanship instruction.
In my opinion.
