Whats your take CFI's?

[gravity1]

Today i had a student who is working on an instrument rating. He is an older gentleman and is very thorough and a good pilot. We finished up our ground and i asked him to do the performance, inhouse flight plan and the preflight. I grabbed some coffee and an hour and 15 minutes later, the aircraft was still in the hanger. He wasnt wasting time, just being slow. Most of my students complete this task in 20-30 minutes. Whats your take on hurrying your students through something as important as these two steps. Its not something i want to do, but we have time restrictions on the birds and other people waiting to fly??

[lelebebbel]

This sounds similiar to teaching a new student how to preflight or flightplan. My solution is not to rush the student, but to let them come in and just start earlier.

 

It should be possible to arrange that at least most of the time, and when occasionaly it isn't, i would just help him and share the preflight tasks. Be very careful not to leave the impression that you are in a hurry when doing that though.

[coanda]

It isn't the end of the world to tell a student to shorten up his/her preflight time.

You can tell them to come in earlier. Or just tell them you're concerned that you aren't going to be able to fly the entire lesson you had planned because some one is in the bird right after you. Also you might (if they are working towards a career) tell them that while a commercial operator should and probably will give you enough time to preflight they will expect you to do it in a timely fashion. I would go with your scheduling dilemma first.

Edited June 15, 2009 by coanda

[coptermedic]

Has he taken this long with prior preflight & planning or was this a single occurance? I'd ask him if he is having any trouble understanding or performing the task(s) at hand. I would even observe him the next time he is going through the preplan & preflight to see if you observe any issue's or hang ups. I'd do one or the other or a combination of both.

 

Fly safe;

 

Steve

[kodoz]

Might want to look at what your other students are doing. Are they checking weather, actually doing a CG and calculating performance for that day and that aircraft, and are they doing a careful or perfunctory pre-flight? At the school I trained at, everybody consistently went skids up 30-45 minutes past the hour; anybody who was ready to fly in less was suspect, or was able to get the helicopter early. And you could bet that, on the rare occasion of seeing somebody working out CG or HIGE/HOGE, it was because they were doing a check ride or cross-country.

 

For this student though, see what he's doing and where he might be getting slowed down. What's the "in-house flight plan"? Just performance and fuel burn? Or weather, waypoints, headings, alternates...? He may be making it more complicated than it needs to be. Organize the planning process for him so he has a systematic method for gathering info. He may also be being unnecessarily precise (like re-calculating groundspeed for a heading change of a few degrees, calculating fuel burn during climbs and descents separately from cruise when you're climbing up to 1000 AGL). Set a standard so he knows what the expectations are (eg, can we carry enough fuel for a 1.2 hour instructional flight in the vicinity of the airport, and will we be in CG at full- and zero-fuel? vs during this flight we will burn 18.5 gallons of fuel, moving our CG from X1 to X2).

 

Either way, it's easier to get somebody to be less stringent when they're being too anal, than to get somebody who's impulsive and careless to go the other way. I wouldn't rush him, but point out what's expected and help him find ways to efficiently get there.

[Rick McWilliams]

My wife is very thorough with the preflight inspection. She uses a flash light to see into the dark recesses. It takes her about 5 minutes. She finds things that have been missed by the mechanic. I think that familiarity with the mechanics of the helicopter will help the pilot not abuse the aircraft.

[RkyMtnHI]

Today i had a student who is working on an instrument rating. He is an older gentleman and is very thorough and a good pilot. We finished up our ground and i asked him to do the performance, inhouse flight plan and the preflight. I grabbed some coffee and an hour and 15 minutes later, the aircraft was still in the hanger. He wasnt wasting time, just being slow. Most of my students complete this task in 20-30 minutes. Whats your take on hurrying your students through something as important as these two steps. Its not something i want to do, but we have time restrictions on the birds and other people waiting to fly??

 

 

Hey Gravity...

 

don't want to hijack your post, but what happened to hdh website... i thought it was the best of the best.

 

i sure would like to know who designed it and hire them to do one for me.. any help there?

 

please send me a pm.

 

aloha,

 

dp

 

oh yeah, give us old guys a break... we see things from different perspectives! :-)

[Hovergirl]

Instrument training is especially good for getting in the habit of doing LOTS of stuff beforehand, and maybe you can just move the time frame back a bit more. If he can know in advance which machine he'll be flying, he can take the temp and get his performance check done before he even shows up at school (it shouldn't change that much, or he can put in a little margin of safety). Likewise the flight plan can be done ahead of time, just tell him a day or two in advance where to plan to, and he should have charts, routes etc. Getting briefings and filing with FSS always took WAY longer than I wanted, but again no reason that can't be done before the flight block even starts. I think if you can get him to the point where he can do this stuff independently he can start in working on it earlier. (or schedule a ground lesson right before his flight until he can do this)

 

I personally spend ages doing my flight plan, a lot of that time just 'fretting' emergency landings, DA, alternate stops for fuel etc. Just gotta start earlier. I also take a long time to preflight, and the only thing I was ever told was to be there as soon as blades stopped turning from the previous flight so I could get up earlier, but not to rush the preflight. Complacency is easy enough to get as it is, we don't need to encourage it.

 

Good luck and hang in there -- I had a lot of short flights at the beginning of my instrument too...

 

HVG

[500E]

Hi G1

The time is not the problem it is the school schedule that is being impinged on.

I think the check to see if there is a glitch in method of doing FP. or even a problem with numbers (Dyslexia? I have this problem with transposing numbers, it takes me a long time to check my calculations).

I have found that if ask people with this problem they are happy to know that you understand, & ones without the problem just say no.

 

It could be that he does not realise that the time taken is a problem to the school, has it been mentioned?.

If the gent is doing the flight plan as required and checking this is good.

Us old farts have managed to stay alive as long as we have due to luck in earlier life and hopefully learnt to reduce risks in later times, we understand that we were not immune to accidents, & the older you get the longer you want to stay alive!! you also realise that we do make mistakes & time checking is not always wasted.