I think a large scale shift in flight training over to using AoA concepts would be appropriate. In my ten years of flying I've been impressed how efficiently procedural most pilots are in their flying habits while at the same time they often display a weak feel for the airplane and an even weaker knowledge of applied flying concepts. I know why- the GA primary flight training culture from the FAA on up has a serious weakness in terms of its basic approach to flying. Can we fly safely without AoA being a serious part of our flying consciousness? Sure. Would making AoA a large part of our flying consciousness improve us by making us more aware of what is going on physically around us, and as a result make for safer pilots? I have no doubt that it would.

In the 1950s the FAA in conjunction with GA industry, took a strong turn toward dumbing down GA so that a wider cohort of average persons would be able to adopt and use aviation on the personal level and buy airplanes. They stripped out the more challenging flight training tasks and dumbed down flight concepts in such way the average person could understand it. They separated cause from practical solution, and supplied rote flying methods. They removed spin training for example while industry supplied nosewheel airplanes with spin resistant designs, reed type stall horns and automatic instruments like the self righting attitude indicator, directional gyro and turn and bank indicator. All that helped. But the unfortunate side effect is that entire generations of GA pilots fly by rote procedure and have a weak feeling for the airplane with an even weaker appreciation of flight science.

What I would like to see is a return to an emphasis on thinking about flying "while" flying. It's a rich, sophisticated discipline that deserves a higher level of academic awareness and the technology to add things like AoA, g-loading, tail plane performance, n number, and so on is cheap enough now to justify having it. We can get these things on a cell phone for heaven sake, why not have them in a configurable screen on a glass cockpit display and implement training from the FAA on up how to use them.