Clip4
Final Approach
I have been doing this stuff for over 30 years. Done it the way you think is best, done it the way the FAA requires in a 141 school. Part 61 or 141, the best teaching method involves a syllabus the student receives and contains the lessons / standards and utilizes a training record. You are a good example.Quite frankly, yes. I am not exactly the brightest person in the room and I didn't have any exposure to aviation before I started, but even I was perfectly capable of reading and understanding the ACS before taking my first flight lesson. I may not have understood what it would feel like to hold an altitude +/- 200ft or even what the gauge would look like that would tell me how high I was, but I knew I would need to be able to do it. Perhaps I am just so used to learning things on my own that my viewpoint is skewed on this, but why wouldn't/shouldn't a student be able to judge his progress, even in the early stages, by the ACS? I am not saying he has to perform to ACS standards the first time he does a maneuver, but for me, it was very satisfying to watch myself get better and very motivating when I was able to perform within standards (and know it in real time) on my second or third attempt at something. It also enabled me to ask better questions when I was struggling with understanding something. Knowing more leads to better questions which leads to better understanding which leads to better flying.
Also, I am glad my instructor chose a more encompassing approach for my flight lessons than you are describing. If I struggled with something, we were able to move on and go back to it later. For example, I struggled with righthand steep turns for most of my training. I would nail a lefthand one and immediately flunk the righthand one. Instead of spending the next twelve lessons hammering at that until I got it perfect so we could move on according to the syllabus, we moved on to other things. After four or five lessons doing other things, we returned to steep turns and I was able to perform both directions quite well. If you're switching CFIs all the time, I guess I can understand why you can't allow the students that flexibility - but to me, that flexibility is one of the perks of going to a part 61 flight school or an independent CFI.
Steep turns are a performance maneuver not required pre-solo in Part 61.87(d). Typically though, steep turns are introduced on Lesson 4 and reviewed in Lesson 7. Instructors don’t expect students to be proficient doing a maneuver once and we don’t keep doing steep turns until perfected - actually far from it.
The pre-solo performance standard 141 is to simply establish, perform and recover from steep turns - a rather low standard with no specific performance standards for altitude, airspeed or heading . The student is expected to be safe performing this maneuver.
If you thought you were expected to do steep turns “quite well” at this phase of your training, you set a false expectation for yourself from relying on the ACS. A syllabus provides the standard for the phase of training. There are specific performance standards for maneuvers in the syllabus and those standards change as the student progresses in training. A student doesn’t progress if they fail the specific performance standards and the student remains in that lesson until the standard is met.
The reason is simple, if you don’t have the core prerequisite skills for the CFI to intro a new task, the CFI can’t introduce the task. This is why we don’t teach landings lesson 2 and work on basic aircraft control first.
An active student in Phase I training will complete pre-solo training in 9 lessons and solo on Lesson 10 (~15 hours instruction). If you are the “average” student and able to fly 3 days a week, you will solo in less than a month. If you desire flexibility, it will cost you more time and money.
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