A Good Flight Instructor Gives Briefings Before and After Each Flight
There are many good Flying Clubs or Aviation Schools out there that all have good intentions, but life gets busy for everybody, and sometimes the best intention doesn’t actually come through in the most effective manner. That said, most Flight Instructors provide briefings prior to each Flight Lesson. You take the time to talk about what you will be doing in the lesson up in the sky, what you will be hoping to achieve, how it will take place, some common mistakes to watch for, and any other pertinent information.
However, most Flight Instructors don’t seem to give debriefings after your Flight Lesson.
How Much Do You Really Want to Learn?
If your Flight Instructor cares about your learning process and about helping you learn quickly and efficiently, they’ll provide you with the necessary feedback in order to help you grow quickly.
You do need to have fun getting along with your Flight Instructor, and although having fun and joking around is an important part, just remember, you’re paying a lot of money for that one hour flight lesson and you should ensure that you can take a step forward with every lesson. I know a lot of pilots who joked around and had fun with every flight lesson, up until the point they were at 55 hours and no where near getting their PPL.
Then suddenly there wasn’t much joking around or fun.
If you and your Flight Instructor just turn the time into “buddy-buddy” time, before you know it you’ll be at 50 hours of flight time and you won’t be anywhere near your destination when it comes to actually getting ready to take your Flight Test.
My suggestion? Have a little fun, but be sure to have the majority of your time learning something. Think of it like 80% learning, 20% jokes and fun.
Want to Seriously Learn Fast and Step Ahead of the Rest?
If you’re serious about getting to your goal of becoming a Private Pilot in Canada as efficiently as possible, as you land and taxi back to the flight school or flying club and before you do your shut down procedures, take the time to ask your Flight Instructor about what happened up in the sky during that flight lesson. Consider this your debrief. Don’t look for the typical, “You did great, man! Way to go! You’re a natural!” but rather insist on the hard truth, “How could I do it better next time?” Ask questions. Ask a lot of questions about how you can improve.
If you want a better answer, it starts with asking a better question.
Don’t be satisfied with general answers and the ol’ typical, just keep at it… ask very specific procedure questions about what you did, about how your Instructor did it, get them to really think and break it down. Ask a lot of questions that are detailed, and you should press until you get detailed answers.
You should be able to walk away from the lesson with 5-7 really good solid tips for each flight lesson.
What Do You Do With This Information?
Take a moment back at the flying club or the flight school to go to your car, go to “check out the planes in the hangar or something“, but really, go to any quiet place, make note of exactly what you did up in the sky in that lesson, how you made mistakes, the list of mistakes you made, the details that you got from your Flight Instructor, and what you should do next time.
If you wait, well, you’ll miss some of the details because you’ll forget.
Moving to the Next Level on the Next Flight Lesson
Now that you’ve taken the time to make your own debriefing notes, you should have an accurate record of what the lesson was and where you were lacking.
Before you go for your next lesson, do some research ahead of time by checking your Flight Training Manual and read over all the details of the flight lesson, figure out what you should have done better, and actually prepare for your next flight lesson by being specific and targeted about what you need to learn. On your next Flight Lesson, any good Flight Instructor will start you with a review what you did on your past flight lesson.
However, if you’ve taken a bit of time to study and prepare with the notes you made from your last lesson, you should have put in at least an hour of preparation work going over and researching and trying to understand where you went wrong on the previous lesson. You can even ask some of your buddies about how they overcame these challenges. The one thing you know about every pilot in the world is that they love talking about flying! Be that guy who listens and learns something from the people who are more experienced.
I wish I did this more.
On your next lesson you’ll be amazed, it’ll be as if your brain and body solved the problem and just figured it all out, you’ll suddenly nail it for your next lesson.
You can review your briefing notes as you go, and then one day you’ll wake up with 25 -30 hours of flight time, and if you’ve done this for every flight lesson, you’ll have an amazing resource of specifically what you need to know in order to be an incredible pilot.
Very few Flying Clubs or Flight Schools have the dedication to devote all this detailed instruction to each student pilot. I encourage you to take the initiative to lead yourself well by picking up on this discipline as early as possible.
Do I Really Have to Listen to You and Do This?
No, you don’t. Remember, I didn’t do this for every flight lesson… I only started doing this much later in my flight lessons when I realized it was taking forever to get where I wanted to go! Remember, this is a series of posts about what I wish I would’ve done right from the beginning.
But remember, you don’t have to listen to this, you’ll still probably end up with your PPL eventually, but why take 60 hours if you could do it all in 40 hours?
That additional 20 hours could cost you $3000 or more, and even worse, it will probably also cost you an additional 3 – 5 weeks!!!
If you’re the kind of person that has to learn everything the hard way, well, how’s that working out for you?
It’s a mindset thing, you either recognize that “time” is the most precious thing in the world, or you’re the kind of person that has to learn everything the hard way, from your own mistakes… and if you have to learn everything the hard way, well, good luck with that. Learning from people who are more experienced can help you grow without wasting so much time.
LAST TIP: I took the time and spent about 2 hours with a Transport Canada Pilot Examiner and we went over every single flight exercise and detail of the Private Pilot Flight Test.
If you really want to prepare well for your flight test, you can listen to the tutorial preview I put together about this here, Private Pilot Flight Test – Common Errors, Part 1. It’s a two-part series because there were so many details and such good advice, it just took a long time to get them all down.
Hope your flying is going well! Keep at it, no one ever accomplished their goals by giving up, and no amount of struggle or misfortunate can stop you if you have perseverance to stay focused on your goal!
Check out Step #7 – Get What You Need for Your Flight Bag
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