Why do many pilots suck at landing?

[photofly]

Nothing personal about it. You're a lovely guy. But you still took money off people to train them for their dreams, instead of telling them that in your opinion, they're not cut out for it.

Worst of all, you bitch and joke about it here, as if it's something for which you have no responsibility.

[Colonel Sanders]

Of course, my students are the finest in the nation

[dr.aero]

photofly...

But you still took money off people to train them for their dreams, instead of telling them that in your opinion, they're not cut out for it.

You just don't get it, do you? How do I know that someone isn't cut out for it without taking money off them to train them? Do I have any right to say that a student must stop training and cannot switch instructors? The answer to that is NO. It would be ignorant and stupid of me to assume I had the right to do so.

Worst of all, you bitch and joke about it here, as if it's something for which you have no responsibility.

As for my "responsibility", see above. Where does it say that the instructor's responsibility is to ensure that, if the instructor determines that the candidate isn't suitable to be a pilot, the instructor must ensure that the student doesn't complete training with another instructor and that the student doesn't go to a different school, etc?

I don't joke about it - it's sad to see the quality of training and quality of pilots now.

[Colonel Sanders]

I have a horrible confession. A very long time ago, I
taught a really nice older lady. She had trouble going
solo, but we persisted and got her solo.

But I got a really bad vibe. I knew that sooner or later
we would read about her on the front page of the newspaper.
A really nice lady, but she just didn't get a lot of basic
physics. You would not let her push your lawnmower.

So I "got busy" at work - I would never tell someone
to give up flying, because that's just my opinion - and
another instructor helped her do her flight test - which
she struggled with - and finally got her PPL.

She buys a C150. Not a 152. Has the O-200 which
she is running 100LL in. Not good, I tell her - too much
lead, it will stick the valves. She ignores me, that's cool.
Lots of people ignore me.

She and the husband set off for OSH. Valve sticks before
they make Lake Michigan, thank goodness. She sets down
on an artillery range where a SWAT team is shooting. I
am not making this up. After a while, she decides that
OSH via Lake Michigan is a bad idea and turns around
and heads back home to Ottawa.

Well, it's a bit hazy north of Lake Ontario, and she never
got around to learning how to use the radio nav in the
panel. Got talking to Brampton UNICOM who told her
to land on 33. Which she did. At Pearson. It was under
construction. Workers and equipment scatters everywhere.
After a while, she miraculously takes off - again - and somehow
navigates home.

This was all long before GPS made it into the cockpit. Hard
to imagine, but true. People actually used to get lost.

TC fined her $100. I couldn't believe it. If I had gone apesh1t
and done all that, they would have cut my nuts off. Again.

Anyways, my long-winded point is that

1) I knew she was destined for trouble (strategically)

2) She specifically ignored my advice on sticking valves (tactically)

But I wasn't about to crush her dreams. Who died and elected
me one of the Kings of Canadian Aviation? I have met people
like that - one was a Contest Director at Hanover - and they
suffer from a real lack of perspective, not to say humility. Maybe
I was wrong about my evaluation of her?

[photofly]

Gauntlet's down: to all those instructors - as few or as many as you may be- who think that most pilots shouldn't be flying, and who like to whine about it in public: do tell us what your personal contribution to fixing this issue has been. How many of your students have you CT'd? Or is this majority of pilots who are born without the right stuff being just somehow by chance not turning up at your door?

Where does it say that the instructor's responsibility is to ensure that, if the instructor determines that the candidate isn't suitable to be a pilot, the instructor must ensure that the student doesn't complete training with another instructor and that the student doesn't go to a different school, etc?

You're the one who sees the problem, and as an instructor, who else is in a better position to have done something about it. Of course I don't expect you to have had the balls to ensure the student doesn't complete training; although if you did have them, and if you were sufficiently cocksure of your own ability to judge others as you like to sound, then you would surely have done so.

But to how many of these substandard students - from whom you were happy enough to take money and hours PIC on your way to the right seat of a turboprop - did you even take the trouble to provide a word of friendly advice? "Sorry, old bean, I don't think you're cut out for this flying business. Why not try something else?"

[dr.aero]

photofly...

You're the one who sees the problem, and as an instructor, who else is in a better position to have done something about it. Of course I don't expect you to have had the balls to ensure the student doesn't complete training; although if you did have them, and if you were sufficiently cocksure of your own ability to judge others as you like to sound, then you would surely have done so.

Really? And if you were an instructor you would "have the balls" to ensure the student never finishes his/her training? You would be overstepping your rights so much and you'd be fired in a heartbeat. I know you wouldn't even try anything like that so don't pretend you would.

[photofly]

How do I know that someone isn't cut out for it without taking money off them to train them?

I don't know. Presumably the same way that you "know" that most pilots aren't cut out for it. One would think you'd have even better insight into the ones you bothered to train and yet you're happy enough to slam the majority of the rest.

Do I have any right to say that a student must stop training and cannot switch instructors? The answer to that is NO. It would be ignorant and stupid of me to assume I had the right to do so.

Yet you claim the right to judge the majority of pilots in general. What does that say about you?

[photofly]

Really? And if you were an instructor you would "have the balls" to ensure the student never finishes his/her training? You would be overstepping your rights so much and you'd be fired in a heartbeat. I know you wouldn't even try anything like that so don't pretend you would.

I can promise you one thing: I won't make facile judgemental stuck-up comments about the innate suitability of the majority of pilots to fly unless I'm damn sure I've not been part of the problem myself.

[dr.aero]

Colonel...

Those are tough positions to be in. I'm sure there are lots of instructors who, with hindsight, can look back and say they shouldn't have recommended a student. With the amount of hours I'm guessing you have, I'm not surprised you've run into a situation like that. I've been lucky and I think I can honestly say I haven't recommended anyone who I didn't think was proficient enough. There have been instructors who've been torn on whether or not to recommend a student and then that student crashes and the instructor feels quite guilty. That happened at one school I instructed at. A student had poor multi-IFR skills and ended up crashing (killing them) a few months after passing their IFR ride - on the second try. I won't provide details but it seemed pretty clear, to people in the know with this student, that the student's poor flying skills was most likely a big contributing factor. If I was the recommending instructor you can bet I'd feel some guilt.

photofly...

Yet you claim the right to judge the majority of pilots in general. What does that say about you?

You judge every person you meet in a matter of seconds, photofly. Don't pretend that my opinion that I've encountered a number of pilots who I think aren't cut out for flying means that I have the responsibility to tell them they can't continue flying anymore. Get back to reality.

I can promise you one thing: I won't make facile judgemental stuck-up comments about the innate suitability of the majority of pilots to fly unless I'm damn sure I've not been part of the problem myself.

No, how about answering the question photofly or just dropping the subject. Would you or would you not have the balls to ensure a student never finishes their training if you thought they weren't cut out for flying?

After you answer that question, tell me how I'm part of the problem.

[photofly]

Don't pretend that my opinion that I've encountered a number of pilots who I think aren't cut out for flying means that I have the responsibility to tell them they can't continue flying anymore. Get back to reality.
...
No, how about answering the question photofly or just dropping the subject. Would you or would you not have the balls to ensure a student never finishes their training if you thought they weren't cut out for flying?

After you answer that question, tell me how I'm part of the problem.

You don't claim it's a number of pilots; you claim it's a majority.

You don't claim it's among pilots you've encountered; you claim it's among all pilots. Everywhere.

Would I CT a student? Oh, I'm sure I'd be just as yellow-bellied and cowardly as you were, on that score. However I'd now have the good grace to realize that if there were pilots out there who were never going to be up to a reasonable standard, and there was a chance I'd instructed some of them and let things pass unsaid - I shouldn't bitch about the situation in a public forum.

[PilotDAR]

Phew, I'm glad I'm not an instructor, so I can legitimately duck all this, and keep my balls!

I was gonna post something about landings, but it looks that I should start another thread for that...

[Chuck Ellsworth]

This is an interesting thread, funnily enough we were sitting around discussing this last month. "We" including two guys who train upwards of 200 working pilots every year all across the country, and are two of the most experienced and best training pilots in the industry. Probably close to 40,00hrs between them.

The conclusion after a great deal of food and beer was essentially this:

- As with almost any other profession, a large majority of pilots are not really cut out for flying.

Above is what STL wrote...

.....reading it in its full context he was describing " working pilots "

I agree with STL and the other pilots he was talking with.

[Colonel Sanders]

Our motto is, "We've never had one stuck up there yet!"

[Shiny Side Up]

Gauntlet's down: to all those instructors - as few or as many as you may be- who think that most pilots shouldn't be flying, and who like to whine about it in public: do tell us what your personal contribution to fixing this issue has been. How many of your students have you CT'd?

First, there's a difference between pilots who shouldn't be flying and pilots who suck at flying. The former is usually some sort of personality disorder, often these people shouldn't be unsupervised in public either, but that's a different matter. These folks are mercifully few, the human race wouldn't have survived long if these folks made up the majority of the population. Pilots who at any given moment for a particular reason suck at flying is different. The currency issue is one reason amongst others. In many cases these pilots have the potential to do better. Some lack recency, some have gotten poor training, some just haven't had opportunity. A fortunate point is that many of these fellows know what they suck at and generally stay away from those areas of flying. Lots of people at least know they suck at crosswind landings for whatever reason and avoid them. Small blessings. How good they will be depends on how good they want to be, something that's not always apparent to the instructor, and something that might change, always in motion the future is.

But to how many of these substandard students - from whom you were happy enough to take money and hours PIC on your way to the right seat of a turboprop - did you even take the trouble to provide a word of friendly advice? "Sorry, old bean, I don't think you're cut out for this flying business. Why not try something else?"

Again mercifully few. I dread having this sort of conversation, and I doubt its productive in most cases, if its given to the type who shouldn't be flying, these guys are always hell bent. There are enough scoundrel instructors* out there to take them on. I just refuse to start with them anymore, I made the mistake of training one of them once. He still out there wrecking airplanes and scaring the shit out of people, and somehow not dead. Lesson learned from my days as a new instructor. Not a bad stick, just not as sane or reasonable as one would want. Lots of more reasonable people who aren't a suited to the task, I often have that talk where you have to tell them to get to an appropriate level its going to take a lot more work than one can anticipate. Most, so forewarned, are very reasonable about it. Some decide its not for them, others bite the bullet, but that decision is in their court. My last two PPL students have been of this sort and have been long term projects of mine which have been very rewarding to see finally complete. They will never be awesome pilots, but they will be assets to the aviation world which in some regards is more important, and better yet they have that want to get better and a hunger to learn more. For one, the next thing to do is to tackle the Cub, and for once I'm looking forward to it.

*This classification of instructor seems appropriate, I'll give the Colonel credit for coining the term.

[trey kule]

Our motto is, "We've never had one stuck up there yet!"

We are still talking about flying, right?

This thread took an interesting turn.. When I was instructing years ago I had some pretty amazingly good students. I always wondered how thay have made out over the years.
And I had some students that were slow as molasses to learn, but in the end I think they turned out to be pretty good pilots.. Again, I have to wonder how they made out over the years.

If there is one thing that I have seen that makes the difference, it is attitude..Overconfidence, not caring about the details. Watching Top Gun to many times,,,,,and of course,, the 'good enough' standard.

Now dealing with new, and generally young CPL's I see the same thing..Very hard to determine who will work out well in the long term, but attitude is a big factor in my experience..Rationalizations , justifications, and cowboys seem to be definite indicators of not so good performance..Much more so than stick and rudder skills. People can learn better basic skills, but only if they realize they need to.

The helicopter guys are very different..In the fixed wing world, as a general rule, you get very good at your specialization if that is where your career path takes you, and as long as you dont step outside that you can be very successful..If you are on the path to heavier machinery, the equipment usually gets better, and the flying easier..When it comes to helicopters, they dont send the 100 hour pilot to sling a tower up to the top of a mountain in 30kt winds or try to land on the deck of a north sea oil rig.So with experience you just get harder and harder tasks.. The result is that most heli pilots that have been around for many years are very good at their jobs...or have quit the business or gotten killed. The fixed wing system lets some of the poorer ones slip through the cracks, and with the current straight from the flight college to the flight deck of heavy equipment, I think this trend is going to get worse...

Now back to the thread topic.. Here is a bit of trivia..In China airline pilots do circuits in 737's.. Not sims.. Not just one or two. They train all day...the record at one airport was 80 circuits in a day...
I used to chuckle about this seeing a 737 in the circuit all day as I imagined the cost and the cycles on the gear, flaps etc.
But in general, Chinese airline pilots land the 737s far better than Canadian pilots. Amazingly better..
Consistient greasers. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. IIRC correctly, even with smaller aircraft in Canada in commercial ops, there is little focus on landing other than at the beginning and end of a training session.. Maybe that has changed but in the past I dont recall any king airs or metros doing an hour or two of circuits..

[Beefitarian]

I don't know what it was but I remember watching a heavy doing circuits at Abbotsford.

Watching Top Gun to many times

[Chuck Ellsworth]

I used to fly out of Moses lake Washington and Boeing did circuits all day long in the 747's.

Doing lots of circuits incresases your landing skills just like playing ping pong or golf on a regular incresases your skills in those areas......and of course when we were young and needed money to spend on girls we had the pool rooms...lots of practice meant lots of winings to blow on girls.....it is acedemic.

[trey kule]

Now I am curious.

Do Air Canada and WestJet pilots get circuit training on type? If so, how much (number of circuits)

[pelmet]

So I "got busy" at work - I would never tell someone
to give up flying, because that's just my opinion - and
another instructor helped her do her flight test - which
she struggled with - and finally got her PPL.


Well, it's a bit hazy north of Lake Ontario, and she never
got around to learning how to use the radio nav in the
panel. Got talking to Brampton UNICOM who told her
to land on 33. Which she did. At Pearson. It was under
construction. Workers and equipment scatters everywhere.
After a while, she miraculously takes off - again - and somehow
navigates home.

This was all long before GPS made it into the cockpit. Hard
to imagine, but true. People actually used to get lost.

TC fined her $100. I couldn't believe it. If I had gone apesh1t
and done all that, they would have cut my nuts off. Again.

Anyways, my long-winded point is that

1) I knew she was destined for trouble (strategically)

2) She specifically ignored my advice on sticking valves (tactically)

But I wasn't about to crush her dreams. Who died and elected
me one of the Kings of Canadian Aviation? I have met people
like that - one was a Contest Director at Hanover - and they
suffer from a real lack of perspective, not to say humility. Maybe
I was wrong about my evaluation of her?

I remember that landing in Toronto instead of Brampton. It was national news. I'm sorry, but I'm of the belief that certain people should not be flying and need to be told so. Lots of others pay the increased insurance and many others are injured and die because of people who should not be flying.

We all make mistakes and even reasonably competent and competent pilots have accidents but some pilots are almost inevitable crashes waiting to happen. I say, tell them to try stamp collecting or building plastic model airplanes. We should strive to weed them out. Perhaps instructors should be our first line of defence. We need more competent pilots who have at least average skills or better, good judgement and a good attitude toward flying not more pilots with a serious lack of any one of these three items.

I was doing checkouts on a three reasonably experienced pilots last summer to send solo in three different aircraft. There was pressure to get this done as they were needed for flying. One was a breeze and it was a pleasure to send solo. The second was pretty good. The third had been handed off to me after some difficulty. This is an easy aircraft I am checking him out on and almost every landing was a problem along with a bunch of little things that are not hard failures but bothersome. So you do more and more circuits and say that if things work out on this circuit I will send him solo. Things finally seemed to work out so after touchdown, I said let's make this a full stop but then a couple of more things happened after that and I said to myself..."screw it, if there is a problem later on and it turns out I sent him solo with doubts, it is my fault as well". So I pawned him off to the big boss to finish the checkout after passing on my doubts about the pilot. In the end he finished the checkout and I'm not aware of further problems but I 'm not going to pass a pilot with problems that are not getting better. Especially when they have a decent amount of time.

On the fine issue, I always read the COPA newspaper section on violations. I remember how the fines for some fairly serious stuff used to be around 100 dollars but all of a sudden they went up to sometimes in the thousands of dollars range.

[pelmet]

I talked to my boss a couple times about the student. It was my boss that requested a detailed report from me regarding the student's progress. The problem was that he was be sponsored by an organization to complete his training so it wasn't as easy as having a chat with the student.

Keeping details about the person you are training can be a good idea. I am not an instructor but have checked out several people over the years in various aircraft. One problem I had was with a pilot in a light twin at a local company. The pilot had about 2,000 hours including some turbine time and experience in several faraway countries. But...there were a bunch of problems encountered on the checkout and early on I had decided to keep notes on each flight making sure to mention the good and the bad in detail. Still have them somewhere.

Wouldn't you know it, at some point after the checkout, a letter of complaint was filed that included the checkout. Fortunately, I still had all my notes which were fairly damning(and probably unexpected by this person to be revealed). I submitted the notes which were quite extensive with my response and never heard another thing about it. Trying to recall all the difficulties would have not been easy.

[photofly]

We need more competent pilots who have at least average skills or better

Sorry to be a pedant, but for any reasonable distribution of skills, the "average" falls in the middle. No matter the standard, half of pilots are below average by definition. Perhaps you meant that we need more pilots with at least adequate skills.

We can't all be above average but we can all be better than adequate.

[photofly]

But in general, Chinese airline pilots land the 737s far better than Canadian pilots. Amazingly better.. Consistent greasers.

Isn't it the case that Boeing landings must be "firm" according to Boeing? That pilots are not supposed to fish for soft landings?

[Beefitarian]

Now I am curious.

Do Air Canada and WestJet pilots get circuit training on type? If so, how much (number of circuits)

Sorry, I should have mentioned that was in the nineteen hundreds.

[dr.aero]

trey kule...

I do know that AC has done and I believe still do circuits in the airplane. I'm not sure if they still do it regularly or what the deal is but I do know that my friend's father flew an A330 from YVR to YYC to fly circuits as YVR couldn't accommodate them.

pelmet...

I agree keeping notes is a good idea. You can usually tell if something isn't going well in training and you get the feeling you should be jotting some things down!

photofly...

Isn't it the case that Boeing landings must be "firm" according to Boeing? That pilots are not supposed to fish for soft landings?

The second sentence is correct.

[photofly]

from page 6.21 of the Boeing 737-300/400/500 flight crew training manual, which you could find online if you bothered to look:

a firm touchdown on the main gear is often preferable to a soft touchdown with the nose rising rapidly... A very smooth/soft touchdown is not essential, or even desired, particularly if the runway is wet.

It's in the section on landing risk factors.

Same book, page 4.50 ff, Holding, Approach and Landing:

Do not allow the airplane to float; fly the airplane onto the runway.... A smooth touchdown is not the criterion for a safe landing.