Flight Training - November 2012 - 51

Is he looking blankly out the window? Is he chatting about the ball game? He may need you to remind him to prepare for the next task. Maybe you should quiz him on which way the wind is blowing or what airspace you’re currently in. The real challenge for you is to find tasks that you can take over or

add to get your student’s workload where it needs to be. You are the game designer, and the flight lesson is the game. The really good news here is that trying to get your student to hit “flow” can be a lot of fun for you, too. You can raise your own level of challenge by trying to make the lesson fun for your student.

Then you have the added bonus that both you and your student get to spend time in the cockpit with somebody having fun.
Rebecca Gibson gives flight instruction and flies Part 135 in the Chattanooga area. She has more than 4,500 hours dual given since 2000.

THE AIRCRAFT DOESN'T CARE IF IT'S DARK OUTSIDE, BUT IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE TO THE PILOT.

Teach your students a healthy respect for night flying
» By David Jack Kenny

NIGHT MOVES

WITH ALL THE time and money one spends earning a pilot certificate, why seek more instruction than the regulations require? That depends on what the pilot plans to do with that certificate once he's earned it. Night training is a great example. FAR 61.109(a)(2) doesn’t ask much of aspiring private pilots: If you can squeeze a 100-nm cross-country and 10 circuits around the traffic pattern (full stops) into three hours of dual, you’re done as far as the regs are concerned. As an instructor who is on the ball, however, you know that night flight requires even greater care than daytime aviation. Getting your students training before

cutting them lose shows a healthy interest in their success. True, the aircraft doesn’t care if it’s dark outside, but it makes a difference to the pilot. Without enough lights on the ground to define the horizon, night VFR effectively becomes instrument flight. Spatial disorientation can hit immediately after takeoff. Even instrument-rated pilots may succumb if they’re slow to get on the gauges—witness the 18,600-hour ATP who put a Beech Baron into Lake Erie on a night departure from Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport. A large, really dark area is a great way to demonstrate this to your student. They’ll need the attitude indicator to tell which way is up.

Even when they can find the horizon, there’s no guarantee they’ll see whatever’s between here and there. Careful planning of the climb and descent paths is crucial, as is an en-route altitude comfortably above any obstructions. Remember the two Civil Air Patrol instructors who took a Cessna 182 out of North Las Vegas. One was the state wing commander, the other a former national vice commander; both were ATPs with more than 25,000 hours apiece. Thirteen minutes after takeoff on a clear November evening, they flew straight into Mount Potosi.
David Jack Kenny learned to love night flight— after getting his instrument rating.

MIKE FIZER

NOVEMBER 2012 FLIGHT TRAINING

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Flight Training - November 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Flight Training - November 2012