Training Flights...

We think about safety as a flight school every day...

We are constantly creating initiatives and procedures, fine tuning them, keeping them "top of mind:" flight risk assessment, pre-flight briefing, lesson plans, homework review, maintenance and squawk review, heads up taxi, checklist use, hot spot recognition, departure briefing, CRM, SRM, positive exchange of controls, centerline or abort, traffic scan, sterile cockpit, etc.

There's a real semantic missing link in all of this though, if we're not careful. I had an insightful discussion with one of my CFI's recently at while a group of us were visiting Disney World. The ride everyone else was going on was too much for me!

We were talking about various elements of our safety program and the reasoning behind them, particularly the rationale for no "touch-and-go" landings as well as our insistence on departure briefings held to a particular format. Both of us were on the same page, but we agreed that there was an element of people who preferred to go a different, perhaps modified, path on these repetitive flights.

Here's where the conversation went from there...

I'd like to propose that there should be no such thing as 'training flights." I only suggest this because it is so easy for an instructor and/or his student to justify shortcuts in the interest of nailing that one task-of-the-day. I recently heard a very logical justification for neglecting departure briefings as "just one thing too many," while he was trying to pull the student's focus in another direction.

Mind you, this is all so innocent. The instructor will certainly do a briefing quietly and internally, safety isn't really compromised, is it?

I feel you, the reader, thinking just what I was thinking as I heard the instructor's explanation.

Wow, this is where it all starts...

Everything that the industry has developed over the past 50 years or so has been focused on the need for enhancing safety by creating procedures and following them! Look back at that list from the beginning of this article and all of those norms, and in come cases rules, have been written in blood... flight risk assessment, pre-flight briefing, lesson plans, homework review, maintenance and squawk review, heads up taxi, checklist use, hot spot recognition, departure briefing, CRM, SRM, positive exchange of controls, centerline or abort, traffic scan, sterile cockpit.

So that's what I'm talking about when I pose the idea of eliminating "training flights." They're not training flights, they're real flights. Safety isn't something we'll add on once we've learned how to fly, they are absolutely foundational to everything that we are doing.

Let's go one step further...

Building the rituals that are designed to keep us safe and following them religiously actually elevate the task of the day by putting it in context. Individual tasks are actually elevated from Rote level by being kept in context, aka Scenario Based Training.

See, the Feds are actually pretty smart as it turns out. Once again I write an article based on an idea or an experience I've had and sure enough, the Feds wrote this decades ago!!