I agree wholeheartly chuck..And this is one of those areas that the FIG, in my opinion failed a bit. The first lesson is supposed to be short to allow the student to get used to the flight training envirorment, remember where the airport is, get only a short PF briefing....and, oh,,,do attitudes and movements.
Most instructors, because they dont understand it themselves, spend a quick four minutes demonstrating and letting the student try it, and never do it again. They never do a post flight briefing to insure the student actually understood the lesson.. Very sad indeed. I see 300 hour , CPL, mulit IFR rated pilots who really do not understand it. Chasing airspeed on the climbs and descents is a common occurrance because they simply dont understand how attitude and power are related. And part of that is related to their instructor technique.
It is the one exercise, when I was instructing that I did not follow the flight lesson plan, and at the risk of boring my student, did very thorough ground pre and post flight briefing and review. It is also one I repeated on the second flight before getting into turns, climbs, descents etc. Those extra few minutes saved hours of corrections in their future training.
But that was then . This is now, and it seems it is more important for the student to spend 20 minutes on checklist compliance in a 172 than actually learn how to fly one. SOP's, CRM,SMS...all seem to be more important nowadays then actually learning to fly the plane. And dont get me started on instructor inspired fantasy scenarios..
Last edited by treykule; 24th August 2012 at 02:16.