May 30 2007
Sometimes all you need is a break
As my school does a mix of civilian flying and instructing for the Naval Academy flight screening course, when the semester ends things get pretty slow. Unfortunately I don’t have any civilian students as of yet, but I do have one Navy student who is still finishing up from last semester.
When I last flew with this student, I was quite pessimistic about whether he would be able to solo before 15 hours as the course requires. Everything he did looked spectacular except for one very important thing…the landing flare.
There was just something off about his timing, he would start at the right point, but he just couldn’t get the timing right. No matter what I said or did, it did not seem to make a difference. I dont know how many times I told him “when your aim point begins to dissapear under the nose…blahblahblah”. We even tried turning an approach into slow flight only a few feet over the runway. He could do that just fine, but it didn’t seem to help his flare.
I flew with him all the way up to 14.9 hours and then asked for an extension from the Academy, which we were granted. Because everything else he did was so good, I knew he was close to being able to solo. If he was a civilian student I would say that he was still way above average in his ability, but the Navy sets a pretty high bar.
I had tried everything I could think of and I could not see any improvement. He is a good student and I didn’t want to just give up on him, so I asked one of the instructors to fly with him for half an hour or so to see if there was something I was missing. They got something scheduled but my student got sick, then he had to take a week off because of all the things associated with graduation.
I had almost forgotten about him when I recieved a voicemail early in the morning on saturday. It was from the other instructor. He said he went up with my student like I asked him to, they did a few landings and he said everything looked fine. He said he didn’t even have to do any instruction, he just watched. Not wanting to waste such a good day, he went ahead and had my student solo.
How a student can go from controlled crashes to landings good enough to solo without actually flying is beyond me. But I guess sometimes its just better not to question. I was still a bit skeptical on how good these landings actually were until I flew with him yesterday. We flew from W29-WWD-OXB-W29 while introducing cross country operations, short field, and soft field landings. Everything looked really good and I didn’t have to touch the controls once. Go figure.
I’m now 6 for 7 with students I have instructed in this program. I can’t take the credit though, these students at the Academy are freakin smart.