my latest gripe. Enjoy. Maybe worth the read, maybe not. Critisize me please

Sometimes, when a private pilot candidate successfully finishes flight training he breathes a well deserved sigh of relief, gets a pat on the back and then he hangs up his headset thinking “well that’s all behind me now”. Well its not. A pilot has a responsibility to himself, his wallet, his passengers and the general public to at all times be current and competent in his aviation skills. Some pilots do just that… others hang it up and only rent an airplane or take up their own plane once in a while. Just enough to meet legal currency requirements or worse, they throw in the towel permanently.
     All too often as a CFI I have seen this story play out over and over again. Joe Pilot got his pilots license in 1990. He flew about 200 hours pretty regularly up until 1993… and has barely stood next to an airplane since. Now its 2005 and he misses the thrill and wants to get current again with a “quick Biennial Flight Review”. What our buddy Joe Pilot really needs is a week long cram session on Private Piloting 101! As a CFI (and maybe I’m being harsh here) I find the lack of professionalism in a FEW of today’s private pilots absolutely sickening. The regulations require that at a minimum, every 90 days you dedicate yourself to 3 miniscule takeoffs and landings. How is this difficult? Step up to the plate for crying out loud! I have heard all of the excuses from “it’s expensive.” To “I just don’t have the time”.
     Let’s do some basic math. There are 24 hours in any average day on earth. The FAA gives you 90 of these earth days to comply with the requirements. That’s exactly 2,160 hours you are allotted to complete a task that doesn’t take but 30 or 40 minutes. Such pilots should show some commitment and some sense of duty! What would happen if Joe Pilot’s boss said “Hey Joe? I need you to get to work signing your name on 3 blank sheets of paper, just so I can make sure you didn’t forget how… ill be back in three months to get them. Good luck.” And when the boss came back Joe Pilot wasn’t done? What kind of person would Joe Pilot Be? He would be a freakin’ lazy no work ethic having kind of person.
     Now for the pricing aspect, lets assume you rent an airplane for $100 an hour and fly really wide and slow patterns which take 10 minutes a piece to go from takeoff to landing. Well you’re your up to 30 minutes for 3 landings. That totals out to $50 dollars - Pretty Cheap.
     About that “quick” Biennial Flight Review, it’s just exactly that, a review! You don’t pass and you don’t fail. You simply review the procedures and fundamentals that you perform during nearly every flight, and all the pilot things that you should know well. If you are a good and responsible pilot who is current and has flown regularly and hasn’t forgotten a lot, the BFR takes a minimum of 2 hours. If, on the other hand, you have put your “pilot stuff” on the back burner for a good while the BFR starts taking longer to finish. When a pilot sets aside being a pilot for a couple of years... nay even a couple of months he gets rusty… some pilots are as rusty as an old bicycle chain, others could pass for the Titanic. The longer you neglect the fact that you have a pilot’s license the more information your brain hits the delete key on.
     Some pilots even resent having to be “judged” every 24 calendar months claiming “I have already passed the Check Ride, why should I have to do this?” Some pilots I have run across forget that something called a biennial flight review even exists and even though they have been flying for 5 years… they have never had one! If you don’t like the fact that you have to take a BFR every 24 months there are other options that some pilots don’t know about. The FAA Wings program for example when completed counts as a BFR. Some seminars and computer courses once completed count as a BFR. When you take a check ride for a new license or rating, your 24 months starts over from the pass date of the check ride. So in technical theory a pilot could begin training on a new license or rating every year and never once take a BFR in a 10 year period, as long as he takes a check ride. But what would average Joe Pilot rather do, take a fail-able check ride or take a non fail-able BFR?
     I suppose that the whole mess could be avoided in the fledgling phase of the pilot’s career. All Joe Student has to do is ask himself a few questions.
     
1.      Why do I want a pilot’s license?

2.      Am I going to be able to commit a several months and several grand to getting a pilot’s license?
     
3.      Do I really intend to fly enough to stay current and competent?

     Before Joe Student answers he has to know what the difference in the two words “current” and “competent” are. A current pilot is legal to carry passengers, while a competent pilot is capable of doing so with a greater degree of comfort and safety for all involved.
     In short, I don’t feel that the BFR should be used as a quick crash course to put pilots back on top of their game after a lengthy hiatus, besides if you haven’t been flying as PIC for that long, any training meant to get you polished up like a new penny isn’t going to be “quick” at all! Success as a pilot is not something in which a person can demand instant gratification. So stay current, stay safe and for goodness sake… go do what you paid so much money to learn in the first place, GO FLY!

hahaha good reply. your one of THOSE guys eh? 

JK.

I love it on a BFR when we pull out a sectional and a plotter and E6B circular computer... even for some guy that has been flying regularly and he looks at you as if you just handed him a piece of a flying saucer panel for him to decode alien text from.

brings me to another point of pilots over- reliance on GPS. I jokingly call GPS the "Good Pilot Simulator" because my 3 year old niece could follow a straight line on a screen better than most! but i have had 2 GPS units fail on me. one was a hand held and one was a penel mount. (not on the same flight... imagine the odds)

Dont get me wrong I love GPS and it makes things convienient but when the thing takes a crap on you its nice just to reach down cool hand luke style and produce a sectional chart and resort to plan B without so much as a hiccup.

I have seen ONE student in 4 years get their license and continue to navigate by pilotage and dead reconing with the chart in their lap with times and distances clearly marked to check points mixed with a GPS as a backup. Its double redundant that way! everyone else hits "direct to" and follows the line into oblivion. without so much as a thought as to what might be charted between them and their destination! possibly what got the washington DC fly by guy in so much heat.

Are you actually using the GPS on your VFR flights?  That good ol' dead reconing and pilotage is an extremely good skill to acquire.  GPS is great, but it can very easilly get you in trouble if you're not careful. 

What are ya gonna do if/when your electrical system craps out? 

When I do a VFR flight with an airplane equipped with GPS I don't even look at the nav pages.  I'll check out the nearest page, and an occasional glance at the other screens, but still have the Nav's on VLOC mode.  It's just another distraction to keep your head inside the cockpit when it shouldn't be. 

IFR is another story though, I LOVE my 330!

Quote:


True. A lot of people to be scared of visual navigation, but if you're suitably equipped with the right maps, charts, and plan your route carefully, there are lots of ways to make it easy for youself (flying at a multiple of 60kts is the easiest!) using a few rules of thumb...

Quote:

Man, I wish this guy had done that! I'm still very good with the old "whiz wheel", but I'll admit I haven't used it much in flight, only for planning. And I always plan thoroughly, and fly the plan.
  I agree with you about GPS- I have only a few hours in a GPS-equipped 'hawk, and I only used it to check my groundspeed. I firmly believe that if you can't navigate VFR with only chart, compass, and clock, you've got no business flying...
  Looking at an old nav. log from my 2000 flight from NJ to Louisiana: checkpoints include "Lake, bridge, Gadsden VOR 170", and "highway, RR tracks, 90 deg. Mt. Airy NDB"... did really well on that trip; my ETA/ATA times were damn close, too. It helped that winds were not much different than forecast...
The only time I got much off-course on that trip was when I followed a VOR radial outbound for too long and didn't realize it was leading me astray due to weak signal.
Should've trusted compass, chart and clock more...

I'm great at VORs and dead reckoning-not so much at pilotage.  I assure you, my navigation skills are intact.

I don't really have interest in doing those things in FS (I generalyl fly heavy metal,a nd I fly hand-flying the 172 in-game is much more of a handful than it si in real life)-as you said, the things on the chart are, more often than not, not in FS. However, one day, I may give it a go.