I currently have four decent students and one “project” as my coworkers and I tend to refer to them. I’m honestly hoping that the project decides that flying isn’t for him, because I don’t think it is.

Admittedly, he’s only had 4 flights so far. But still, by this point, I can get a pretty good idea of just how someone is coming along. And he’s just not. Okay, sure, there’s progress, but at this point I think it’d take 50 hours before I felt comfortable soloing him. I suppose it’s entirely possible he’ll end up surprising me, but I doubt it.

After our flight today, I had a pounding headache. I blame him. I asked my supervisor, “What’s the procedure for putting someone on Commander’s Awareness Program because, they, uhhh–” “Suck?” “Yeah.” He decided to let someone else fly with him next time and see if they concur with my opinion. Yay.

Some examples: His third attempt at a preflight saw him wandering around with the wooden rod we use to check the fuel level. “What are you doing?” I asked him. “Checking the oil?” This was going to be good. I wondered if you could even fit the fuel dipstick into the oil filler tube. But I didn’t get to find out, since he couldn’t figure out where in the plane the oil resides.

Today, we went around the pattern four times. Each time, as we got to 6900 feet, I asked him what we do now. In my briefing, we’d talked through a trip around the pattern, and we discussed the fact that at 6900 feet is when we do the climb checklist– which basically amounts to setting the flaps to “CRUISE”. Every time I around, we’d get to 6900 feet and I’d ask, “What do we do at 6900 feet?” Each time he’d stare off into space.

And, really, that’s what it’s like flying with him. Like flying with a rock. He’s not annoying: he might not even be stupid. He just doesn’t do *anything*. I try to find the smallest things to positively reinforce, because I know that supposedly positive reinforcement works best, and it’s not a tactic that comes naturally. Unfortunately, there’s just not much for me to be positive about.

Takeoffs are usually non-eventful, something that even first time flyers can handle without too much effort. His are disastrous. As we accelerate on the runway, we end up skidding back and forth as he overcorrects with the rudders. That is, if he bothers to look outside long enough to realize we’re headed toward the grass. After liftoff, we’re likely to immediately start flying toward a windsock or control tower.

I’ve only got about 160 hours as a flight instructor, now. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not much, but it is enough to give me a pretty good handle on things. I’m still amazed at how students come up with new and inventive ways to try to kill us every day. 95% of what students do or don’t do I can see coming from a long ways away. And then, every now and again, I get blindsided.

Last week, I told a student to put the flaps down to landing. They were currently in the takeoff position. Next thing I knew we were sliding out of sky and gaining airspeed. He’d put them to CRUISE instead. I was stunned with disbelief, mostly because no one had ever done that before.

The week before, a student requested “Left Closed” on upwind off of 34R. We always fly our traffic patterns to the east– that’s right traffic on 34R, and left traffic from 16L. This may sound confusing on a blog, but students intuitively understand it in the air. So did this one– he wasn’t going to turn left, he just *said* left. The controller didn’t skip a beat. “Unable left closed at this time, but right closed is approved.”

To add to the general stress of simply teaching someone to fly, you should also realize that I’m flying in an incredibly busy environment. The logistics of managing 6 aircraft in the traffic pattern with a dozen arrivals and departures at once, all of whom are student pilots, is just crazy. They suck on the radios, so communication is always amazingly stressfull. And then I realize that after a mere 25 hours in a Diamond DA-20 with us, they’ll be flying either a T-6 or a T-37, both of which go approximately 4 times as fast and are 100 times more complex. And they’ll be learning to fly in formation. And upside down.

I’ve had a few run-ins with the controllers. Some of which are my fault, others of which are theirs.

A recent one:

My Student: Academy Tower, Talon 22 ready for takeoff.
Tower: Talon 22, position and hold runway one-six right.
Student: Position and hold, one-six right, Talon 22.
Then follows some unrelated calls, and a call from ATC I couldn’t really make out. I thought it might be a takeoff clearance for us, but I wasn’t sure. Before I could do anything, my student replied: Cleared for takeoff one-six right, Talon 22.

If we were wrong, the controller should immediately respond that we were *not* cleared for takeoff. He said nothing, so I assumed my student had heard correctly. About 15 seconds later, one quarter the way down the runway the controller started yelling: TALON 22, NEGATIVE TAKEOFF CLEARANCE, TALON 22, YOU ARE NOT CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF, YOU WERE POSITION AND HOLD ONLY.

There were, it turns out, two mistakes here. One: my student misheard the controller. Two: The controller didn’t hear my student’s read-back. Furthermore, the controller was outraged that I would attempt to take off with a plane at the other end of the runway, rolling to the end. What he didn’t seem to understand is that there’s a hump in the runway, and you can’t see one end from the other. Not something that someone who usually views the runway from 200ft usually notices.

There’s an old saying: Pilot makes a mistake, pilot dies. Controller makes a mistake, pilot dies… This was hardly a serious safety situation, but it does make me look like an idiot when the controller is yelling at me. Fortunately, they listened to the tapes and concluded that I didn’t make a mistake.

That’s all for now…