Flight Training - March/April 2025 - 42

Pilots are still capable of blundering into bad
The advent of action cameras is another
weather, having midair collisions, hitting mountains
or tall towers, and getting lost and running out of
fuel-but those things, mercifully, don't happen nearly
as often as they used to. Those of us who remember
the demands of the old days have no desire to go
back. The lack of a GPS signal, a traffic warning
system, or a moving map GPS feels like an emergency
when, in fact, for generations, it was just normal.
Today's online tools, flight simulators, and
virtual reality programs are far superior to the
way teaching and learning was done in the past.
Reading the FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook
was, and still is, a decent start. But now, that dry
material is supplemented by online courses that
are available all the time and can be tailored to the
student's own pace. Immersive video and graphical
presentations are increasingly utilizing virtual reality
and break down each step in the process from flight
planning to execution of individual maneuvers.
New pilots today still have access to all the
traditional methods. They can still attend in-person
ground schools, read the same instructional books
and magazine articles, and talk with more seasoned
pilots. But they also can delve more deeply into
online materials through scenario-based training,
specific coursework, and the
rapidly growing video
and VR libraries.
underrated flight training benefit. In addition to
instructional videos and YouTube Shorts these
cameras enable students to record their own flights
and review them afterward, allowing them to
slow things down and focus on particular areas.
And instead of multiple touch-and-goes becoming
blurred in their minds, they can see trends in
approach speeds, engine power settings, and
runway placement by watching and rewatching
their previous performance. The audio from these
sessions enables students to listen to instructor
comments and observations without the noisy and
sometimes stressful cockpit where the things said
during flight are easily missed or misconstrued.
Regardless of the technological
advances that take place, the
personality traits for success in
flying are timeless.
Flight simulators have been around for
decades-but the advent of motion simulators
like Redbird and Frasca for general aviation and
wraparound graphics have made them more
realistic than ever. Some of them allow students
to log the instructional time. But even those that
don't, like desktop flight simulators, are excellent
teaching tools that can raise student performance
in airplanes and allow them to progress faster.
VR training programs are relatively new, but
they are proving highly effective at preparing
students and helping them absorb the things they
experience in flight.
Flight planning apps like Garmin Pilot and
ForeFlight provide detailed information presented in
a logical format that dramatically improves preflight
preparation, in-flight situational awareness, and
post-flight record keeping in ways that would have
seemed fanciful to previous generations. There are
no mandatory calls to flight service briefers who
would describe the dynamic weather that's now
available at a glance on smartphones and tablets.
And new features allow pilots to review their flights
afterward and evaluate their performance.
Subscription prices for these apps can seem
costly-but they're a small fraction of the price paper
charts used to command, and they can do things like
flight planning and filing that make them invaluable.
Glass-panel avionics are orders of magnitude
more reliable than analog gauges ever were. Modern
avionics allow pilots to fly with greater precision and
situational awareness than mechanical gauges, and
electronics don't rely on the failure-prone vacuum
pumps that pilots used to entrust their lives to for
attitude information.
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FLIGHT TRAINING MARCH/APRIL 2025
Flight Training - March/April 2025

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