Flight Training - March 2013 - 48

INSTRUCTOR REPORT»

Everyone has taken a shower, and
adjusting the water temperature
is like throttle movement during
cruise—a little at a time, and wait
to see the effect before making
another move. A fish tank can
illustrate principles of weather.
Turn off the filter and the water will
stagnate and get murky, just like

sports were mentioned a lot, but
some responses were more diverse.
Stan Brobston was a naval aviator
and later became a professor of
music. He feels his musical ability
helped him fly A-4 jets. “I use sound
to help me determine a lot of factors
in what my plane is doing, and how
well it is doing it,” he says.

and the new skills required for completing the job. “You identify the
skills you have to have and go learn
them, but identifying the skills you
have to have is a skill in itself.”
Transfer of learning can also
work negatively, especially when
two skills are similar but have
important differences. The classic

EARLY EXPERIENCES GAVE HIM THE ABILITY TO DETERMINE IMPORTANT
ELEMENTS IN UNFAMILIAR ACTIVITIES.
classic warm-front weather with
little atmospheric movement. Turn
the filter back on and you’ve got a
cold front cleaning everything out.
One drill for learning airport traffic
pattern entries is to place a board
on the ground as a runway. The
student becomes the airplane, walking downwind or base leg entries at
the direction of air traffic control as
simulated by the instructor.
I began asking pilots what
experiences outside of aviation they
felt gave them a leg up in training.
Naturally, the answers were highly
subjective, and it’s impossible to
separate what actually affected
new learning from merely increasing motivation. Motorcycling and

As a child, Story Musgrave
taught himself to operate every
piece of machinery one might
find on a farm. He draws a direct
line between that experience and
his later endeavors as a pilot and
astronaut. When the Hubble Space
Telescope was found to have critical flaws, Musgrave was assigned
to lead the first servicing mission.
“The reason I got the job,” he
says, “is because I’m a farm kid.”
He believes his early experiences
gave him the ability to determine
important elements in unfamiliar
activities. Faced with a new playing field, as he calls it, Musgrave
attempts to determine the constraints imposed by the situation

sports example is tennis versus racquetball. A tennis swing is primarily
an arm movement, while racquetball necessitates a more wrist-based
action. An experienced player of
one may have difficulties learning
the other.
Flight students often experience
negative transfer while learning
to taxi. For people who have been
driving most of their lives, deeply
ingrained automotive skills directly
conflict with rudder-pedal steering.
Many students reflexively grab for
the yoke when they feel hurried.
Instructors can prepare students
by discussing this beforehand, and
assuring them that their discomfort
will be short lived. Having new

THE KNOWN TO THE UNKNOWN

A curious student is a motivated one
» By Rod Machado

ONE OF THE most powerful concepts in
flight training is to teach from the known
to the unknown. The objective here is
to lead your students to the limits of
their knowledge—and then lead them
beyond that limit. How do you cash in on
something like that? Once your students
experience the limits of what they know,
their curiosity is provoked. A curious
student is a motivated student.
You can do this by giving your students
a problem that temporarily stumps them.
This isn’t as difficult or dramatic as it
might seem. When I first introduce stu-

48 /

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dents to a basic turn, I’ll have them begin
a right turn at a relatively slow cruise
speed. They know from experience with
automobiles how to use the yoke to begin
a turn (the known). What they don’t
know is how to keep the nose pointed in
the direction of turn.
As they begin the turn (to the right if
I have my way, which I usually do), the
nose yaws to the left of the turn arc. Here
is where I’m careful not to say, “Add right
rudder in the turn.” That would supply
the answer instead of the incentive. There
wouldn’t be any unknown to temporarily

bewilder my student. Yes, bewilderment
as a temporary state can be a good thing.
As the nose yaws left, I ask, “Why does
the nose point opposite to the direction
of turn?” At that instant, most students
become curious. Then, I’ll either remind
him or introduce him to the rudder pedals.
In doing so, I lead my student to an understanding about how to solve the problem.
If you can provoke your students’
curiosity during each lesson by providing them with a problem—followed by a
solution—you’ve taught from the known
to the unknown.
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Flight Training - March 2013

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