the ability to prioritize
The trick is that you need the experience and knowledge
to know what you can safely ignore or postpone, and
what you need to pay attention to right now.
This is one reason why most flight instruction is so poor -
the low-time instructor doesn't have the insight to know
what is essential, and what's simply nice to know, and
what you can completely ignore, at any given stage of
a pilot's learning.
The problem is that non-pilots on the ground in administrative
positions will throw all sorts of nonsense at you, and you
need a bit of thick skin to know when to ignore their whining.
The Forced Approach has that problem in spades. And low-
time pilots are generally terrified of non-pilots in administrative
positions.
I'm doing an initial instructor rating with a highly experienced
pilot - like sidestick stirrer, he has tens of thousands of hours
in heavy jets - and he has incredible aviation knowledge.
The challenge for him, when constructing PGI, is to first boil
down to the essentials, what the student needs to know, to
perform the exercise in the airplane. This is not easy to do.
You need to have a thick skin to throw out "nice to know"
stuff that all sorts of whining people will tell you, that you
need to include on the first lesson, in some sort of sadistic
attempt to overwhelm the student.
Once you know what material you are going to cover, then
you need to figure out how you are going to present it, in
the most comprehensible fashion. This is not always easy,
either.
A good example of "nice to know" crap that you can drop
is exercise 6 - straight and level flight. The FIG wants you
to talk about errors of the compass.
Give me a break. That has nothing to do with the core
lesson of that exercise, and should be introduced later - not
on the student's second flight lesson, for Christ's sake. It
takes a thick skin, and some years of experience, to come
to that sort of conclusion and to stand by it.
