Post Targets CFIs and Low-Time Pilots

Community Aviation recently began hosting a blog penned by award-winning Master Flight Instructor Rich Stowell—a recognized subject matter expert in loss of control in light airplanes, 2014’s National FAA Safety Team Rep of the Year, and 2006’s National Flight Instructor of the Year.

Mr. Stowell’s blog focuses on stick and rudder issues; posts are geared toward flight instructors and low-time VFR pilots.

Asked about his target audience, Stowell replied, “First and foremost, our job as instructors is to teach others how to fly. Yet inflight loss of control remains the top fatal accident category by a long shot. To boot, pilots with less than five-hundred-hours are more likely to have a stall-spin accident than a genuine engine failure.”

Titled Knuckleballers: Finding Our Community, Stowell’s inaugural post includes a downloadable infographic illustrating the importance predicated upon stick and rudder skills over the last 120-years.

Mr. Stowell writes in part:

“Scenario-based training overlaps the cognitive and affective domains of learning. This is where aeronautical decision-making (ADM) skills like risk management and situational awareness are developed. But ADM skills alone won’t help us achieve peak performance, either. And dealing with complex scenarios becomes more difficult when we’re preoccupied with the mechanics of flying.

“The current scenario-based training paradigm replaced a maneuvers-based one decades ago. Still, inflight loss of control (LOC-I) remains the top fatal accident category. Number two on the list isn’t even close. Nearly 80 percent of general aviation accidents have at least one skill-based error. And a skill-based error is the first human causal factor in the accident chain about half the time. In contrast, only about one-third of general aviation accidents include decision errors.[4]

“Has the pendulum swung too far toward scenarios? Does scenario-based training assume that manual flying skills will evolve on their own? Does the way we’ve been teaching maneuvers lack relevance to real-world flying? With so much material to cover, are stick and rudder skills being short-changed?”

Knuckleballers will be followed by:

• Learn-Do-Fly: A Framework for Optimal Learning
• Spin Recovery Procedure: My Chat with Artificial Intelligence
• Spin Training – Deadlier than Not?

Founded in 2015, Community Aviation’s mission is to connect learners with subject matter experts in all areas of aviation.

FMI: https://blog.communityaviation.com/author/rich-stowell