Scoobster.
Well done indeed. Very well done.
Your dream can now be reality. You have a day off, a license, access to an aeroplane, cash to spare and the weather is perfect so there is only one thing to do - get airborne. If the next thing that comes into your mind is “Where shall we go?” please give yourself 0/10 because, if you are serious about your aviation, the question you should be asking is “What do I need to do on this trip?” Furthermore, you will establish just what exercises you need to do by looking at your currency chart which is hanging on the wall in your bedroom.
Most GA pilots have no delusions about their abilities, they have no obsessive ambition to become aces, they just want to fly safely and enjoy flying as a hobby. The problem with that very reasonable stance is that aviation has to be worked at all the time and on every flight for it to remain accident free. To complicate things, the demands of any trip can vary enormously and be outside the control of the pilot. A routine circuit on a nice day is hardly the same as one where a fuel pipe lets go at 300 ft after takeoff and the engine cuts, although for the first 40 seconds they were identical.
There are two ways to deal with such serious emergencies. You can just put your faith in others, from the CAA to the engineer in the hangar, hoping they will protect you from a situation you cannot handle. Alternatively, you can be a little less fatalistic and do more training to reduce the odds stacked against you. Even without emergencies there are plenty of ways for pilots to finish up in charge of a bent aeroplane. If we are honest with ourselves, we also know that such events are avoidable if we plan properly and only operate inside our current levels of skill.
Those last eight words are at the heart of the issue I want to discuss here. If you accept this notion, which is hardly controversial, then we do need to try and be objective about our currency. Such objectivity requires a lot more information than traditionally appears in accident reports where currency is usually expressed simply as hours flown on type in the last 30 or 90 days. I am deeply suspicious of flying hours as a measure of currency or even of experience for that matter. What should matter is what the pilot did when airborne, not how long it all took.
Currency depends on what you do, not how long you take to do it. If you accept this, how should you decide what you need to do on this next trip? You get out your chart and look at where the biggest holes are in your currency. Doubtless you are asking yourself questions like how do you draw up the chart in the first place? Just what should go in it? How should you use the chart to reduce risk?
Let us split flying into pure and applied categories. Pure flying is about handling the aeroplane, making it go up and down, right and left and slower and faster. It is about taking off and landing in good weather conditions from an ample strip or runway. It is also about not stalling when we do this. However, every time we do such pure flying we cannot avoid certain risks that are inherent in being airborne.
On the other hand, applied flying is about what we choose to do with the aeroplane when we are airborne. This might be anything from a simple land away cross country to an instrument approach into Heathrow, from low level display flying to deliberately waiting until it is dark to do some circuits at night. All of this applied flying carries extra risks but my point is that such risks can be totally eliminated at a stroke for the amateur pilot by choosing not to do such stuff. However the pure flying risks remain. They are inevitable and can only be eliminated by not flying, something which by definition pilots find unacceptable. Therefore I want your chart to be the tool whereby you assess whether you are as skilled and current as you can be at pure flying and so as well placed as possible to minimise these risks.
There are three distinct things to do in constructing your own personal currency chart. Firstly you must make a list of exercises that you feel (know) you should practise. In the early days of your flying careers that list may include most of the PPL syllabus headings. Later, as you become more experienced, some items can be binned, although probably not that many if you are honest with yourself. Another way to look at the list is to ask yourself what things you would want to go and practise today if you were going to re-take your PPL skills test tomorrow. You should certainly include any exercise that you pray would not come up on your skills test!
The next thing is to decide just what maximum period there should be between the practices of all items on the list - 1 month, 2 months or whatever and note that interval in the second column. Then you want a column for each month, where you will fill in the date on which you carry out the actual practice. In no time at all, you will build up a very useful picture of just what you did with your recent time airborne.
The bottom line of all this is that currency training is important. If you don’t make time for such training and plan it in a systematic and thoughtful way, then you are letting yourself down and certainly increasing your chances of bending an aeroplane (or worse) when doing even the most basic pure flying, let alone the complex applied stuff.
Truth has a habit of coming out, however much some people try to hide it. The bit of truth I have in mind here is that today it is the light aircraft category that makes the greatest demands on piloting handling skills. Forget most modern military fast jets or modern airliners because they are all much easier to handle. I expect a lot of professional pilots will see red at that remark so I had better justify myself.
The operative word above is ‘handling’. Handling is about steering the aircraft through the sky which is quite a different thing from operating it. Modern fast jets and airliners are extremely complex devices to operate which is why their pilots have to undergo so much training and are then faced with never ending currency and rating checks throughout their careers. This operation of airliners involves navigating extremely complex air traffic environments, coping day in and day out with weather that would ground any light aircraft pilot and dealing with command pressures from a wide variety of sources. The operation of a modern military fast jet is again very demanding, indeed so demanding that it is beyond the abilities of the majority of the general population.
Despite how demanding the operational work of military and airline pilots may be, that does not mean the aircraft they fly are hard to handle. Indeed the opposite is true because quite properly the civil and military airworthiness authorities will only accept benign handling qualities precisely because they know their pilots will have their hands full operating the aircraft. There are of course exceptions to such generalisations, particularly among the older types still in service. Those aside, I maintain that light aircraft as a breed do call for more stick and rudder handling skills than most modern heavy metal. It bothers me that some GA pilots may underestimate the challenges they face every time they get airborne because they assume they are at the bottom of the aviation ladder. In fact they are at the top when it comes to handling which is another reason why currency is important for GA pilots.