Regarding the structured hour building. In my own experience, and not disagreed with by colleagues and commercial instructors, the hour building towards your CPL needs to be more about honing the fundamental skills, rather than developing new skills. For instance, by the time I came to do my CPL, my attitude flying was crappy, lookout even worse. As for holding height in a circuit…any thing could be happening, and often was. Much of the CPL training is not teaching you anything new, but just the same old things to a higher professional standard in a higher performance aircraft.
Having now done an FI course (where my flying has improved no end) I can now see that a lot of my inadequacies during my CPL were due to the inability to trim an aircraft ‘using the correct technique’. Earlier on in this thread I mentioned the opportunity to polish your bad habits during hour building…and that is exactly what I did. As a result my CPL training went over the minimums (as mentioned earlier) as I struggled to correctly trim a Duchess at £250 per hour…much better to learn the correct technique to do this in a C150 at £60 per hour when you are hour building.
My recommendation for hour building would be to fly with an instructor occasionally to ensure that you are using the correct technique. in particular:
· Trimming the aircraft correctly – if it is not then everything else will go to **** as soon as you look at your map, turn, talk or whatever.
· Lookout…you are probably not doing enough
· Get the radio right…if you don’t adequately it can really increase the workload
· Fly a height and stick to it (downdraughts excepted)
· Polished circuits (not’ that’ll do) leading to Stabilised Approaches, leading to good landings
· Fly by numbers/procedures not seat of pants (debatable I know for PPLs but essential for commercial training)
· Get used to controlled airspace, ATIS, ground/tower/approach frequency operation, complex fields etc
· Fly to a plan…don’t bumble around. Fly a height and a heading, use a stopwatch
All said and done, I found the CPL to be nothing that I hadn’t covered on my PPL (except multi training). So you can waste your time notching up the numbers or really prepare yourself for a first time pass. The secret? Correct technique and practice.
Do you know if you are using the correct technique?
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