Constructive comments would be welcomed on this subject

[DX Wombat]

First of all I must say that this is not intended as a flaming of the student concerned who, BEagle says, has had many difficulties to overcome and has done very well to do so. It is also not intended as a flaming of his FI.
This thread (http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?t=291717) is currently running in Private Flying and many of us have expressed various concerns and opinions about many aspects of the trip, paperwork and, to some extent, quality of the instruction and supervision of the student involved. Please read it through carefully (right to the bitter end) and then discuss.

[Baboon Boy]

who gives a toss??

Do you have nothing better to do than write pages of posts picking out every little detail of this poor blokes cross country? The thread you direct us to is typical of all thats wrong with aviation, little middle aged geeky men with moustaches who have nothing better to to than criticise others for not following every little regulation and proceedure. Sad.

[Esperanza]

DX Wombat
Before reading both the above and the comments in the Private Flying section I had already made a couple of comments on the Flyer Forum (MrShoe is everywhere).
At a glance:
The safe altitude isn't a safe altitude. The figures are the relevant MEFs. I always teach my students to be prepared for inadvertent entry into IMC. Standard 5 nm/ 1000'/ plus 300' for unknown obstacle calculations.
There are heading calculation inaccuracies. This should have been noticed by the instructor. Having said that, none of us are perfect.
A lack of drift lines makes me wonder what techniques the student has been taught to get back on track/ correct heading to fly to destination.
As to the discussion about the reference features used, I think that BEagle concerns about the reference features used are possibly a bit over the top.
I'm not at all surprised at the standard of the students preparation and potentially the standard of the instruction that he has received. This is a generalisation, but in my opinion the standard of PPL training in the UK isn't exactly brilliant at the moment. Why is this? I don't know for sure. Possible answers are part-timers who are just playing at being instructors, hour builders who really don't want to be instructing, or disheartened instructors who are being paid very little for their services...?

[funfly]

While wishing to agree with Baboon Boy, one has to admit that there are many areas of concern on his plog etc. Problem is that one feels a bit tough on the beginner to browbeat him after he seemed to make the posting with some pride - you want to say something nice to him!
One does wonder why the submissions in other forums - is everything as it seems?

[DX Wombat]

Funfly, I was careful to point out at the beginning that this was NOT a flaming of the student (or even his FI - could that possibly be Baboon?)Trying to strike a delicate balance between obtaining constructive comment (a phrase Baboon doesn't appear to understand) and criticising the lad is difficult to say the least. It came about because several of us thought it was an elaborate wind-up and treated it accordingly to start off with. Once we knew he was a genuine student and more and more errors became evident this then became concern about what he seemed to have been taught, or not taught. I made a couple of erroneous assumptions - which I admitted to and you can see in the thread. I have also said that, after what BEagle mentioned about having to overcome great difficulties, he has done very well indeed. I think the multiple postings may be because he is so thrilled about what he has achieved and wants everyone to know. His poor command of the English language made me wonder if he had learning problems - who knows? Whatever the problem he has done well to overcome it and get this far. More power to his elbow. :ok:
Esperanza Possible answers are part-timers who are just playing at being instructors, hour builders who really don't want to be instructing, or disheartened instructors who are being paid very little for their services...? A couple of years back I was in Australia having a meal with several other PPRuNers, amongst them several FIs, when one of the topics of conversation was exactly that - the number of hour builders who really have little or no interest in teaching and see students merely as a means to their own ends. I was very fortunate to have been taught, for most of my PPL, by an excellent young FI who has since been snapped up by an airline. His enthusiasm for flying was infectious and he really enjoyed teaching. There are good hour building FIs out there.

[Whirlybird]

DX Wombat,

I've gone through that thread, and to be honest I can't see what all the fuss is about. There's more than one way to skin a cat...or plan a route. I was taught to put in 10 degree drift lines and I've always intensely loathed them; they get in the way of visual features on the chart and they used to drive me crazy. Who in the world can't estimate 10 degrees for gawd's sake; I certainly can and I always could. But I can't see a feature hidden under an unnecessary line on a chart. As soon as I had my PPL I put in as little as possible on the chart, using the Plog for almost everything, so that I could actually see the features on the chart! So I give my students a choice of which way they do it. What's wrong with that? People are different, and learn things differently, and instructors should maybe learn to respect that.

Starting somewhere other than overhead the airfield is normal and common if you have a sensible starting point close to the airfield; it saves this orbiting till you get to 2000 ft that so many people do.

His chart and plog are a mess, but mine are like that too - I've never been naturally neat. Looking at it carefully, it seems to have a lot of useful things marked, and I'm sure he knew what he was doing....and that's what counts.

I've suffered from instructors who insist on having things done Their Way and no other. I've seen people who can prepare beautiful charts and then get lost, and others whose preparation looks a mess, but who get where they're going. Whose navigation is best, do you think?

Anyway, none of us were there, and I think far too many people are jumping to far too many conclusions on very little knowledge.

[foxmoth]

To a large extent I would agree with Whirly, this may not even be how the instructor teaches it! How many instructors here have not shown a student something only to have him doing it a different way? Personally I show people the many different ways of putting things on a chart/plog,recommend what I think, and then let them do it to a large extent the way they feel comfortable with, Beagle criticises the half way mark, but what is the problem with this as long as it is not the only time marking he has? - what I do want to see though is that they apply the techniques properly - i.e. NOT map creeping but using timing and waypoints sensibly, recognising when they are off track and using a proper method to regain it etc.
n.b. maybe it is me, but I could not spot the heading errors Esperanza talks about, the only calculation error I could see was the groundspeed (how can you have 100kts TAS and 108kts GS with only 7 kts of wind) - and that was so small it was irrelevant, probably just reading it off the whizzwheel (though this does make me wonder if he does a gross error check - this should have picked this up).
I would also like to have seen a Max drift written down somewhere.

[Contacttower]

From the point of view of a relatively new pilot (compared to some posting on this thread) I find BEagle's comments slightly worrying; my only comments on the XCQ plog and map would be that it is rather messy, has no fan lines and the safety altitudes are rather on the low side (which I admit is potentially serious). However does this really constitute and is it really indicative of just how bad PPL nav training is? The reason I ask is that many PPLs like me simply don't really know any better and when experienced instructors like BEagle come along and say 'You really haven't been taught very well' it makes me wonder how it should be taught. Have standards of training really slipped that much over the years?

[Bahn-Jeaux]

Re the heading errors, input his data into Drauks wonderful site and see what you come up with.

The error which is noticeable is the final leg with a true heading of 178º, after adding his marked correction of 2º west, he comes to a magnetic heading of 200º

That being said, any errors he may have come across were obviously corrected or he wouldnt have completed his QXC. How many of us have realised we have made an error but have not corrected on paper because we know what we should be doing in reality.

[foxmoth]

The error which is noticeable is the final leg with a true heading of 178º, after adding his marked correction of 2º west, he comes to a magnetic heading of 200º


Yep - I missed that - too busy looking for errors in the drift calcs!:}

[BEagle]

Maps do NOT have to be works of art, but, as a minimum, I would expect to see:

Headings at the start of legs in nice large clear writing.
Elapsed times at significant visual fix points (these should be at approx fractions of the total route, i.e. about 1/3 or 1/2 depending on the leg length to facilitate proportional timing correction. But at roughly 15 min intervals).
Elapsed time at ends of legs.
Mean wind velocity arrow and worst case Safety Alt (MEF +1000) in the middle of the 'triangle'.
Max Drift next to the W/V arrow.

As for drift lines, perhaps one per leg from the start point. But NOT used for angular assessment! We INSIST on 'Standard Closing Angle' for track correction as the primary method, so off-track distance is used for correction. The angular value is read off and applied once back on track IF the error was down to incorrect met wind. But NOT if the cause was inaccurate flying, incorrect rudder trim, misaligned DI etc.

Looking at a student's map will highlight whether he/she has been taught particularly well or not; however, why did the supervising FI not check mrshoe's navigation planning beforehand?

As for fuel calcs - most light ac fuel gauges are horribly inaccurate. So all I would wish to see is (flight time + 1 hr) x burn rate loaded - although we always send them off with full fuel on Q X-Cs.

[foxmoth]

Headings at the start of legs in nice large clear writing.
Elapsed times at significant visual fix points (these should be at approx fractions of the total route, i.e. about 1/3 or 1/2 depending on the leg length to facilitate proportional timing correction. But at roughly 15 min intervals).
Elapsed time at ends of legs.
Mean wind velocity arrow and worst case Safety Alt (MEF +1000) in the middle of the 'triangle'.
Max Drift next to the W/V arrow.


Headings - he has this, written by the side mixed with other bits, not ideal maybe but it is there and presumably a system he is familiar with.
Elapsed times en route - again there, maybe not how you would do it, but I know at least 3 ways of doing timing marks, all of which I was taught in HM RN and all of which work (i.e. second leg he has eight min marks with an extra one at 17 to give use a better feature), yes he maybe could have done this better, but not a major problem.
Elapsed time at the end of legs - yes you can, but that is on the plog and easy enough to look at on there.
MWV arrow and Safety alt - both there, MWV arrow is in the middle of the route in red, not easy to see and I would have liked to see a better colour used, I would also put max drift next to it. Safety alt is there, besides each leg which is where I would prefer it myself - these are wrong as many have pointed out and to my mind the only thing apart from the 200 heading that I would really find worth criticising!

[Contacttower]

I was taught just to but the lines in, plus fan lines and marks for features at certain times. That along with the wind in big red chinagraph was the only stuff that went on the map- anything more and it was considered that the risk of covering features on th map was too great. Everything else like max drift, headings etc went on the plog.

[No Country Members]

Whirly wrote:


I've suffered from instructors who insist on having things done Their Way and no other. I've seen people who can prepare beautiful charts and then get lost, and others whose preparation looks a mess, but who get where they're going. Whose navigation is best, do you think?



Absolutely right. I have suffered similarly at the hands of an inflexible instructor when moving from one method of downwind checks (eg.) to another at a new school. Having learned one method, it rolls off the tongue in my head with ease and over the years I have steadfastly stuck to it as if it were a company SOP, it does not let me down. If I had not argued strongly and stuck to my guns there would be a land of confusion with each change of instructor. I always prefer aviation to be repetitive to the point of boredom, then mistakes don't get made in the preamble and I free up capacity to notice and learn something else. I wonder if this chap whose technique is being examined had continuity of training or consistent methods taught?

[Esperanza]

First of all I'll say that I'm possibly being a bit thick, but I really can't make a great deal of sense out of what mrshoe has written in his blog/ website.
It appears to me that:
Sept 6th: 1st Solo. Flew 2:25 of which 1:25 was solo. I'm guessing that this may have been two dual/ solo sessions. No law against it, but in my opinion quite a lot of solo flying on the first day.
Sept 8th: All solo consolidation completed. Not unreasonable.
Sept 9th: First dual nav trip.
Sept 11th: QCC. Really? I would have thought that two to three dual nav trips followed by some little solo navs would have been needed before QCC.
I'm possibly missing something. To me the whole thing seems a bit odd. :confused:

Note: I've just seen that some nav training did take place during August. One flight at least.

[funfly]

Slightly changing the subject but on the subject of fan lines......
I found that a thin bit of perspex cut to the correct angle (making a long triangle) makes drawing fan lines on a chart so much easier and quicker, why not encourage your students to make one for themselves.

[bunnywabbit]

Blokes lucky!!! He has an instructor! Most schools are really struggling at the moment.

[DX Wombat]

Most schools are really struggling at the moment.Maybe it's time for them to start paying FIs a reasonable amount. I don't know how some FIs exist on £6 per day plus an amount for any lessons flown. :(