editmonkey wrote:Procrastinating at work today and thinking about flying. Got another question for the oracles here:
I'm whiling away an hour looking through the Skyway Code and my air law book (as you do ) reading about FMCs and VOLMETs and wondering how the hell 35-45 hours of training can equip me to both the technical art of skillfully flying a plane AND navigating the airways. Seems at the moment to my relatively untrained eye that you could quite easily spend 35 hours alone just learning how to navigate and communicate.
5 hours in, and so far and for the foreseeable future the course is all about those basic tech flying skills, right? A couple hours on climbs and descents, a couple of hours on turning etc building as I go. At what point generally in the course does radio and nav kick in and how much time is given over to them?
Do pilots find that by the end of the PPL course that they're doing these things with ease - finding the right frequencies, communicating with the correct services, navigating confidently around CZs etc? Just curious as to others' experiences.
There
is a lot to do once you are off on your own, make no mistake about that. Especially once you factor in navigation and then also dealing with the unexpected. How overwhelming that is depends on a number of factors including:
Where you fly - some areas are more complicated to fly around in terms of controlled airspace to navigate or avoid;
When you fly - in terms of the weather conditions;
What you fly - some aeroplanes are more complex than others, meaning that you have more to manage in the cockpit;
How fast you fly - may sound silly, but things happen more than twice as fast at 160kts than they do at 80kts.
How extensive is your own 'experience bank' - at the start it's very small;
How current you are - unlike driving (which you probably do every day without really thinking about it) you will probably only fly periodically. The 'muscle memory' and neural pathways associated with the necessary skills will fade quite quickly if they are not used.
How well you were taught, and how much you want to keep on learning - the first is outside of your control (unless you up-sticks and move schools) but the latter is entirely within your own gift. A good pilot NEVER stops learning, no many how many thousands of hours he has.
So finally (and most importantly) it will depend upon how well you manage yourself and your work-load in the cockpit. It is quite easy to fall 'behind the aeroplane' if any or all of the factors listed start to pile on the pressure. And pressure in the cockpit is self-reinforcing: the more pressure you feel, the less you are able to crawl out from under it; and so the more pressure you will feel.... As you get to the point where you've run out of mental head-room you start to miss things, forget things, react late (or not at all), make poor decisions (or no decisions at all). You are then potentially heading for an accident or at the very least for a dispiriting experience.
So, one of the critical skills you will be taught is about cockpit management. Managing yourself and your work-load so that you are always ahead of the game and not behind it. If you get that skill right and you apply it ruthlessly then you'll find that your capacity as a pilot grows exponentially with experience. If not then you'll never progress beyond the unsafe hobby-pilot.