Originally Posted by
WildSmurf
I’m currently a part-time flight instructor, but I do spend time looking to see how other universities train their students. I have come a cross the combined private and instrument training course. I got my hand on one of the Training Course Outlines (TCO) and am surprised to see that the students are made to shot LOC,ILS, VOR and the list continues before the student solos. The student then does his dual cross countries then is sent to a stage check to solo. After the solo the student then has to hold on fixes. I’m honesty just curious to see what anyone has to say about this, seems like the student is going to take a long time to get through. In my experience, some students find out they don’t want to be pilots after they solo or receive their private ticket. This along with the fact that many students stop flying due to money. There is a lot to learn in the FARS about VFR and IFR, seems like to much information to push on someone new. Sorry for the long post, but I am just interested to see if anyone has something to say.
WILD SMURF
I was employed by a university that performed this "experiment." When it was presented to the instructor group, skepticism was only the beginning of our opinion. Long story short, the trial groups did not live up to expectations. You may see papers and stats saying it worked, but that wasn't my experience. As mentioned, there was too much information for a student to digest and their growth was slowed because of it. Even in a TAA, the students had all the problems normal students had, plus flying a more-advanced/complicated system. They could fly the basics and knew what the system displayed, as long as nothing failed. It was extremely difficult to teach the systems of a G1000 because the students had nothing to tether to. Transition training is easy. Teaching it from the ground up took too much time.
In the end, we found that the "best" students--those who were self-motivated and very sharp--did well and completed the program with few problems, but most students simply became overwhelmed at the task.