Originally Posted by
fireflybob
The best instructors I have had always teased out my innate curiosity to actively go out and find out more about the subject - they didn't just tell me what they thought I needed to know.
If they were doing ab initio insruction then they were doing it wrong. There is quite a lot of information
that the student must know. Now in an Air Force or College program you have the luxury of having full time students doing nothing else but learning to fly and you can afford to gold plate the training with a lot of non essential theory.
However this is the private aircraft forum and I can say on the basis of a lot of personal experience teaching ab initio and low hour pilots, getting the time to make sure the student has mastered all the must know stuff and a reasonable amount of the nice to know stuff leaves very time for unstructured satisfactions of curiosity. In fact digressions into theory often come at the expense of study on stuff that really, really matters.
Originally Posted by
Mach Jump
No problem with this at all. I just don't think they are mutually exclusive.
MJ
All knowledge in flight training is not of equal value. The challenge is teaching the right amount of information at the right time. Since flying is an innately practical exercise there is not all that much theory
required to safely and efficiently fly the aircraft.
Knowing and understanding the basics of how a carburetor functions is IMO vital to fully understand how to avoid carburator icing and how to correctly use the mixture control, both of which are obviously must know areas.
Understanding the theory of why a compass has errors has no practical use in flight. So it would not be mutually exclusive only if teaching this was not at the expense of something that actually matters, which is going to be pretty much everything else. Given the time constraint realities of flight training in the private flying arena, this is IMO a tall order.....