Just adding my 2cents from across the ditch:
1) I was originally taught what I think is now unfortunately the more popular idea that leaning is something you don't bother with if you're below 3000ft. Now I also believe that during my PPL training I was above 3000ft for possibly two or three lessons, so that goes to show how much training I was given on leaning! My thinking now however, which I do encourage in my students, is you should lean any time you're going to be in straight and level for more than a few minutes! For a moderately large flying school/club you could save thousands of dollars a year doing this. We also lean on the ground, which prevents the otherwise almost inevitable (in our aeroplanes at least) carry on of having to set more power and lean the hell out of the mixture in the runup to clear plug fouling!
2) To me the idea of telling a student where you're diverting to in advance is ludicrous, at my club we make very certain the student doesn't know where they're diverting to, and on at least a couple of occasions I've accidentally let it slip/been overhead and then gone and changed it to somewhere else to maintain "realism". Of course there is nothing wrong with having an airfield which you are planning on diverting to if you can't make your destination, that in itself is good planning, but that's also relatively easy even for a low hour pilot to do. The unexpected diversion to an unexpected airfield is where people catch themselves out.
3) To be fair we don't calculate fuel burn for the climb, however we do emphasise the fact that our hourly consumption figures are typically very slightly higher than the actual cruise consumption which helps balance it out. The consumption figures most commonly given are also normally based (at least at lower altitudes) on not leaning the mixture, for which refer point 1 above!
4) We have the Spidertracks flight tracking system in our aircraft which makes filing a sarwatch somewhat unnecessary (yes I know more people looking out for you is never a bad thing, but you do have to stop at some point!) however it is compulsory for all of our students to file a flight plan/sarwatch on their pre-PPL crosscountries so that when they fly somebody else's aeroplane (or the Spidertracks isn't available for whatever reason) they know what to do!
Another one which I have found is quite common in some of the so called sausage factory students is filing a sarwatch for the very end of a multi-leg journey "to make it easy" which is going to be cold comfort when you crash 15 minutes into the flight and no one comes looking for you for 5 hours.
Last edited by NZFlyingKiwi; 26th Jul 2013 at 06:46.