Originally Posted by
abelenky
I have two suggestions for helping your student:
First:
If you have a handy setup, I'd suggest this is a situtation for Flight Simulator (either Microsoft Flight Sim X, or X-Plane).
In particular, focus on the "PAUSE" feature. Let him fly to each "next-step", (turn-to-base, turn-to-final, flare, etc,) pause the sim, then talk about it in detail before resuming.
Its very difficult to discuss decisions and correct bad choices while flying along at 65 knots. The beauty of simulators is that you can pause in the middle, review everything, then when you continue, he can make the "proper" decisions.
Do this over and over, until he can do it properly without any pauses.
Then you'll be ready to try in real life again.
NOOOOO! This is a very bad idea for the vast majority of students. PC based flight sims are horrible for hands-on, stick-and-rudder skills...you will only develop and reinforce not-quite-realistic-enough muscle skills.
Also, the lack of all-around visibility not allow students to not look where they should be looking, or use their peripheral vision.
Even with a cockpit mockup it's a very bad way to learn to fly initially. Professionals use sims to learn to fly advanced aircraft but that is only because advanced airplanes are very expensive to operate. The pro-pilot's skills and experience allow him to compensate for the significant realism errors present in even a level D sim.
MS Flight sim can be useful to brush up on IFR scan and procedures (holds, etc) for someone who has already mastered those skills, but nothing stick-and-rudder.
Originally Posted by
abelenky
Second:
Be sure your student has rigorous, exacting checklists.
For example, I had one instructor who told me:
When you're near to abeam the landing spot, Carb-heat on, slow down, nose down.
The much better instructor taught me:
EXACTLY abeam the landing spot, carb-heat on, throttle to EXACTLY 1500 RPM, nose to EXACTLY 5 degrees down.
The first set of instructions left me a lot of margin, which turned into errors.
The second set told me exactly what to do, and gave me a criteria to judge my own success/failure on.
Then you have to enforce that your student follows the precise steps. If each step isn't done exactly, he can't go on to the next one.
Good luck!
This is good advice...specific targets for each phase of a maneuver takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation.