AOPA Air Safety Institute Presents: Top 10 Things Pilots Should Know with Jason Miller

buddy welcome thank you for being here my name is jason miller and uh for the next 40 minutes or so we're gonna do some talking about flying you guys probably haven't done a whole lot of that in the last couple days have you how many people is your first time to oshkosh ever all right welcome the rest of you all are old pros feels funny having not been here in a year but i am very very happy to be back and uh for those that don't know me i'm a certified flight instructor sort of by profession that's what i've been doing for the last 22 years to pay my bills and feed my family it's what i love to do i'm an atp but i have really no desire to go to the airlines everything i do is flight training i work with pilots in the san francisco bay area and up in the foothills near lake tahoe specialized in sort of a technically advanced aircraft and instrument flight training but i really enjoy doing all of it uh primary flight training and a cessna 152 is still very much fun for me um i have a company called the finer points some of you might have heard of we do podcasts and youtube videos we also make an ipad app for pilots where i try to take the stuff that i've learned over the years and put it into a technology that can kind of get out to everybody all that stuff is online at learnthefinerpoints.com if you're interested in checking any of that out we also run training trips for pilots we took last year off but we're back to it this year we do a mountain flying trip near lake tahoe we do a canyons trip down in monument valley and an island's trip up in the pacific northwest so it's funny you know after all these years 20 plus years of teaching flying sometimes people say to me you know doesn't it get boring you know teaching the same stuff over and over and over again but um the reality is it's it's not the same stuff over and over and over again because the students and the pilots that i'm working with are constantly changing so even though the longer i do it the main message that i'm trying to convey gets distilled and gets simpler and simpler and simpler the ways to convey that message and the techniques that i use to get that message across to people um is always different depending on on who i'm flying with and the talk that i'm doing here the top 10 things all pilots need to know or all pilots should know started out as a book and i think it's actually going to be coming out later this year it's a pretty short book it's 50 pages or so and i think we'll make it a free download online but this is this has become central to sort of like my thesis in flying the stuff we're going to discuss here this afternoon in the next 35 minutes or 40 minutes is is really the the one message in 10 parts that i would want to give to any pilot no matter what your experience level and i think it's important to understand when we think about flying that we are a very as a group we are a very specific type of adventurous person right flying is an adventure i think you guys would agree with that right taking a heavier than air vehicle and soaring through the air is some kind of adventure but we're pretty cautious adventurers right there's a difference between pilots and base jumpers we're not just reckless right we're not doing anything not that base jumping is necessarily reckless i don't know anything about base jumping but i do know about flying and when it comes to flying risk mitigation is part of the fun right like we look at an adventure we look at a challenge and preparing for that challenge planning for that challenge executing that challenge and knowing that we're prepared for the possibility of things that might go wrong is all part of the reward when you end that flight and you know that you've executed that mission safely there's a particular kind of satisfaction in that and flying is inherently dangerous what did the english have an old saying so it goes something like you know all airplanes bite fools right and the kinds of airplanes we're flying i'm assuming we're not talking about flying transport category jets but we're talking about flying general aviation aircraft the kind of aircraft that we're flying are pretty simple simple in the sense that i like to distill the danger down into three possible things fire failure and collision if we can mitigate the risks around those three things in the airplanes we're flying then we can execute missions safely one year at oshkosh here um maybe i don't know how many years ago eight or nine years ago i had a the good fortune to meet bob hoover does everyone know bob hoover just a childhood hero of mine one of just a legendary aviator if you don't know bob hoover when you leave here you should go google bob hoover but anyway he was driving his little golf cart around and a crowd of people stopped him and i happened to be there and somebody asked him hey bob how do you get to be 90 whatever years old you are and done all the things you've done and survived the war and all the things you've done how did you stay safe in an airplane over the years and without missing a beat bob hoover said if you stay within your own limits and within the limits of the machine you'll be just fine and those are very very wise words so when you talk when you think about mitigating those risks and executing the missions safely that's when you start to realize who the best pilots are right there's an old saying in flying that there are no old bold pilots right there's old pilots and there's bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots and when you think about a guy like bob hoover saying that if you always think within your own limits and understand what those are and understand the limits of the machine that that's what will keep you safe then you start to realize the people who are really top of their game in this business are the people that can continually execute missions safely right so there are maybe crazy pilots doing crazy things with phenomenal skills that end up crashing someday and that's not the kind of pilot that i would aspire to be or try to teach somebody to think like right we want to think like bob hoover and when you look around the industry and ask yourself who's doing this better than anybody else who's really top of their game there who's executing missions on a daily basis and executing them safely and really who you have to look at are the professional operators and when i talk about my thesis and talking about distilling what i've really learned over 22 years and trying to pass that off to pilots in large part it's how to distill the secrets that the professional operators have learned into a single pilot unregulated environment that's the trick to take what the people who are doing the best at this the professional operators to take what they're doing and distill that into something that we can use are inspired to use and are diligent enough to hold ourselves to on a regular basis and that's that's going to be the hardest part so let's take a quick look at what that process is and that's going to be the first top 10 thing that i say it's called bracketing safety or at least that's what i call it are you guys familiar with the process of bracketing a navigation signal do you know what that means for anybody that doesn't it means like you know if i want to hold a course that's right here maybe i start off going this way a little too much and the course goes left so i kind of go back this way a little bit and then i kind of eventually i figure out a heading that's going to hold me on that course so through a process of small corrections i'm ultimately able to hold this course perfectly that's bracketing and what the professional operators do as a group i call bracketing safety here's a statistic and it's a true statistic it's pretty unbelievable but in the last 30 years commercial operators as a group that is cargo pilots airline pilots corporate flight departments all commercial operators have been able to reduce their fatal accident rate by 83 percent which is staggering if you think about it 83 less fatal today than they were 30 years ago and here's a kind of a rhetorical question if you want to try to figure out where we are in ga i always ask people imagine somebody you love you know like for me if my daughter or my wife uh called me and said hey i'm in florida and um i'm thinking about coming home tonight i'm gonna buy a ticket on american airlines will you pick me up when i land at 9 30. how many people feel a deep fear that that's not gonna go okay nobody right nobody feels a deep fear now imagine my wife calls me and says i met this really nice guy his name's rick and he owns a 180. he said he'd fly me home how do you feel about that right like so here we are we're pilots we're in we know the game and there's no way she's getting on that 180 right i'd say forget that not even if i talk to rick doesn't matter she's statistically she's not getting on that airplane so that's a problem right so what are the professional operators doing that allow them to be so successful to be 83 percent less fatal today than they were 30 years ago it is a very simple process and it's not by the way about fancier equipment you know de-icing equipment redundant jet engines um any number of things because anybody in this room who's flown a complex airplane knows there is nothing safer or easier about flying an airplane with complicated systems the safest airplane out there is probably an iranca champ or or probably not a tail wheel a cessna 150 right statistically that's a really safe airplane it's got what the old school guys call a low bs to fund ratio right it's a very easy airplane very simple very safe the more complicated it gets the more dangerous it gets it's the system that the professional operators use to bracket safety that makes them so safe and that system goes like this the first step and it's a three-part process the first step in that system is being aware of what goes on out there of looking at the accidents looking at the crashes if a crash occurs in the commercial world they all look at it not just the company for whom the accident happened all companies in the industry will look at what happened in that accident so step one is you have to be aware we'll come back to that in a minute step two is they figure out a procedure that would prevent the possibility of that accident from ever occurring again and step three is well in step two also they make that procedure redundant and step three is they force compliance with the procedure and that's it it never happens again in the united states by and large commercial accidents are once and done that's it it happens one time and it never happens again to anybody that's unbelievable and that's how you bracket safety that's how you reduce your fatal accident rate by 83 percent um there are a couple cases by the way of repeat accidents there's like an md 80 and with a flap setting issue in the late 90s let's not talk about the transoceanic thunderstorm accidents but i mean by and large a commercial accident occurs and it never happens again and you can you can look at some examples of this in 2007 in lexington kentucky some of you might remember there was a com air flight that departed off the wrong runway because it was departing on a runway that had co-joined approach ends so when they turned onto the runway they meant to kind of turn onto this one but they turned a little too far and got onto this one the lighting was bad they were talking about different things on the taxi out they ended up departing the runway that was too short the airplane crashed everybody except one person on board was killed so everybody in the industry looks at that and makes sure that there are procedures in place to prevent the possibility of that from happening again i at the time that accident happened i was flying for a private owner and i was down in santa monica killing time [Music] this is the i really don't mind the airplane noise but i'm just gonna pause for a second while it goes by i was down in santa monica hanging out at a pilot's lounge and i kind of had nothing to do so i just asked the guys that were in the room and the girls that were in the room in uniform like hey did you all see that crash in in lexington everyone's like oh yeah we saw it and i said did anyone's procedures change as a result of that and with in unison everyone's like yep yep so i asked him to just start telling me how did your procedures change and every single person in the room no matter which flight department or which fractional operator uh they were flying for pretty much told the same story they said well now the pilot flying has to visually identify the runway entrance and the runway number the pilot monitoring has to verify it when we line up with the runway the pilot flying has to call out the magnetic heading on the heading indicator and the pilot monitoring has to verify it right so they told this story that is what i just described a they looked they looked at the accident they came up with a procedure that would prevent the possibility of that accident from ever occurring again and they made that procedure redundant and then they forced compliance if their pilots don't do that they're fired that's that all right so i went back to san carlos where i had students and i told my students in the run-up area listen we have a new procedure we're going to visually identify the runway number and we're going to call it out we when we line up with the runway we are going to cross-check the magnetic heading against the heading indicator and verify that it's the actual runway heading and we're going to call that out and we're going to do that every single time and if you don't do it every single time i'm going to you know jab you in the ribs or whatever it is i do as the right seat nag so if it ain't broke don't fix it if it's working for the pros it can work for us and that's an example of how to bracket safety if you drill in just a little bit to the specifics of that example we have an extra challenge in the general aviation world one is we're not redundant we don't have a pilot monitoring that's a big one no pilot monitoring is is big redundancy is a very difficult thing to conjure in a single pilot environment the best people we can look at in the professional world to emulate are part 135 single pilot operators so if you have an opportunity to get a hold of any of the sops that standard operating procedure that the single pilot cargo operators are using those are the ones you want to try to adopt and they and if you do that you'll see that they do little things like speak out loud because that is some measure of redundancy you know your your ears can cross-check your mouth that is a thing that can happen anybody that's called somebody the wrong name and not realized it doesn't they don't they know i'm in a lecture um anyway your ears can hear your mouth so the example i was just giving is if you go to a party and you call you know hey john it's nice to see you and the minute you say john you realize you're talking to nick that's an example of how your ears cross check your mouth so speaking out loud to yourself is a major way that single pilot operators achieve redundancy another way is simply guessing at something before you verify it how many people use checklists all right thank you that's great but keep in mind there is a difference and a distinction between checklists and do lists you know a checklist in a crew environment is read just item by item so the pilot you know flying might say climb checklist and the pilot monitoring might pick it up and say you know power set you know gauges checked air speed whatever they're whatever's on the list but it's redundant not because it's they're cross-checking anything it's redundant because there's two people there's four ears two brains four eyes they can hear each other they that whole environment up there in the crew environment is redundant by its very nature in a single pilot world just consider this you'd be better served by guessing first through some acronym like gumps or cigars or some flow pattern in the cockpit just take a wild guess at it and then as a second thing not to be dis disregarded but specifically to be done as a separate thing picking up a piece of paper and verifying that you didn't miss anything that's very different than reading a list if there's any cfis here you know the experience of sitting in the right seat and watching somebody go through a checklist and when they look up at an item their thumb moves down two lines so that when they go back to the list they just skipped a line and they have no idea they just skipped a line if you're a cfi i promise you've seen that so that's an example of how reading the list as good as that is and i hope you are reading lists in a single pilot world is not exactly a checklist so consider how you're using those if anybody's interested in doing a deep dive on standard operating procedures i do have a book about that you can find it at learnthefinderpoints.com um but that's that's the basic example of how these types of things speaking out loud uh using flow checks and then checklists these are ways you can achieve redundancy in a single pilot world and then we get to the absolute hardest part and that is forcing your own compliance forcing compliance with the rules that you've decided for yourself ahead of time are rules you want to fly by so in this lecture hall you know hopefully we're feeling inspired to go out and fly like bob hoover or we're sitting at home on our living room sofa and we're going over for flight and we're thinking about the kind of pilot we want to be and we create all these rules and stuff like stuff like this but actually forcing compliance with yourself when you're out there and the heat gets turned up just a little bit is very very difficult very difficult and this kind of gets me to number two on my list i think i'm at number two and i'm gonna ask you guys well this is actually number three number two by the way on my top ten list was standardize your flying but i think we covered that number three is personal minimums how many people out here fly with personal minimums or have a set of personal minimums wonderful does anybody not know what personal minimums are you can admit that it's okay all right well personal minimums are like a set of exactly that things that you decide ahead of time are constraints for you i'm not going to take off if the winds are greater than 20 knots on the nose i'm not gonna take off if the winds are greater than eight knots from the side or whatever your personal minimums are and it can be a pretty you know robust list how many people out there who have personal minimums have actually written them down great that's like the first step in accountability so not just having you know like as a cfi i'm always kind of poking at people to see how solid this is and if i say to somebody do you have personal minimums and they say yes and i say okay what's your crosswind limit they go ah it's about uh it's about nine knots it's like it's it's either nine or it's not right it's either nine or ten i mean it's a specific number so writing them down is the beginning of accountability another suggestion with those personal minimums if you haven't already done this is giving a copy of those written minimums to a pilot you respect we're reaching i know as single pilots in an unregulated environment we're reaching we're like camels going through the desert trying to pack this stuff on anywhere we can but maybe just maybe if if your cfi or somebody you respect knows what your minimums are and has that list at home and you happen to be in south dakota one day and it's a gusty 17 knot crosswind and you're sitting there debating whether or not you should go just maybe in the back of your mind you're thinking well if i crash on takeoff here and break the gear you know richard is going to know exactly what happened and know that i wasn't flying within my minimum so maybe just maybe that's an extra level of accountability for you because it is extremely difficult to hold yourself to this stuff it's the reason i don't own a motorcycle anymore because i decided i can't ride safe enough i ride safe for like the first nine months and then one day i'm really late and i get across town in 10 minutes and i get off the bike and say i'm never riding like that again so i just i don't need that in my life anymore i don't need that risk it's hard to control your own behavior but it's extremely important to to try to do that so we've got the the concept of bracketing safety begins with looking at the accidents that are going on out there and in our world this is very difficult how many people look at accident reports on a regular basis that's really good and i want i want to like get rid of any guilt you might have i know some pilots feel like well i shouldn't be you know this is this is dark stuff i'm sitting here looking at all these people who have gone down or had bad times or bad luck or whatever get all that out of your mind this is a critical first step to understand to understanding what's going on out there and if you don't know what's going on you're doomed to repeat it and it's not easy to come by i all the time i'll be in my office and somebody will come in a student on my third lesson of the day and say hey did you hear about the crash you know in fremont last night which is 15 miles away and i say no i had no idea what happened mostly i had no idea there was a crash a few days ago in truckee california a challenger jet right in right near my neighborhood and if it wasn't for juan brown on youtube i don't think i would have known about it so it's not you know this stuff happens quite regularly too regularly and it's not so easy to know that it did happen so i think we really have to be proactive here and maybe as a part of your ongoing safety efforts take time to review the ntsb reports pick out two or three accidents try to see patterns in what's happening for the specific purpose of not repeating those patterns again and now you know what the airlines are doing you can emulate the professionals you can come up with procedures for yourself that would prevent the possibility of you making the same mistake and these procedures don't have to be complex like if some examples you can go through the accident reports and find accident reports of bonanzas taking off with cinder blocks tied to their tails of airplanes taking off with control locks installed airplanes taking off with pitot tube covers airplanes taking off with cowl covers right that's a lot of different mistakes there's one procedure that would prevent all of those mistakes one procedure it's called a final walk around so at the end of the pre-flight when you're done with the pre-flight and the pre-flight's totally over just walking around the airplane one time looking at the airplane to make sure that none of those things have happened would catch all of those mistakes so that's an example of how you can come up with one procedure that would prevent the possibility of these things ever happening again and i'll tell you a true story which i'm not particularly proud of just to get you know just to underline that last point [Music] i was in dallas texas and this is you know when i talk about turning the heat up when you get out there in the real world and real pressures start happening it's not flight training i like to joke is like flying in a fishbowl this isn't like fishbowl flying when you get out there in the real world there's different pressures different uh needs different distractions i was flying with my my girlfriend who's now my wife says many years ago but we were out flying a d820 little charlie one eclipse you guys know those planes they're like katanas and we're trying to get to new orleans and it's a vfr only airplane so i couldn't fly ifr and the whole time we flew from california we were being sort of chased by bad weather the storm was coming out of the pacific northwest and we would wake up every morning we would outrun it but by the time we woke up the next morning the system was pretty much on us and i remember being in dallas at love field the airplane's right here and i'm doing my final walk around but i'm if the airplane's here i'm doing my walk around like this like i'm just looking at the weather and i remember thinking to myself what are we going to do if we get pinned in here are we going to go to an airport are we going to put the airplane in a hangar so even though i'm doing this walk around doing the walk around i wasn't paying any attention to the walk around at all and i missed two giant red cow plugs blocking the cooling air inlets on the engine they were red they were foamy they had flags hanging off of them and even though i did my pre-flight and my final walk around i missed the cowl plugs but i must have had an angel on my shoulder because when we got out to add power for takeoff i added power the cowl plugs flew out of the engine i saw them the tower saw them they said hey something just came off your airplane i taxied back to the run-up area got the uh got the call plugs went back to the ramp did a proper preflight um and a proper walk around and we were stuck in texas the weather was on us we were stuck in texas for six days but that's the kind of pressure that had me miss giant red cow plugs with flags hanging off them even though i was doing a standard procedure that would have caught the mistake so anyway just food for thought when you think about how to emulate the professionals being aware of what's going on developing procedures that are redundant and forcing yourself to comply with the procedures and to bring the same level of attention the ten thousandth time you've done it that you did the very first time you did it and that's where the real challenge lies right in that that last piece that's where the challenge lies for us but when you make this list of personal minimums this is the beginning of standardizing your behavior standard operating procedures are what we're talking about here that is the process itself of bracketing safety and those procedures should be added to your list of personal minimums so that you know exactly what it's almost like you're making a little operations manual for yourself and it doesn't have to be complete it just has to be started it's a living document hopefully you'll never stop adding to it like when i was in that pilot's lounge in 2007 and i came out with that new procedure that the companies added that's a new procedure for me it changes my preflight my pre-takeoff briefing rather has changed over the years it now has four things that i go over and then emergencies if something happens tomorrow here at oshkosh or wherever and i become aware of it and i can think of a way to change my pre-takeoff briefing such that it would prevent me from making the same mistake that the unfortunate accident pilot made then i will change that pre-takeoff briefing so these aren't set in stone it's a living document it's something you can continually add to the important part is that you start writing it you do your best to hold yourself accountable and you give a copy of it to somebody that you respect so you're not the only person looking at it all right awesome let's move on a little bit from that thought so um [Music] all right let's talk a little bit about four and five here which is dealing with anxiety and flying with kids and passengers do you guys have any questions about the stuff we just talked about standard operating procedure how the airlines and the professionals do it all right good you can think of them if you do there'll be time at the end we can talk about it let's talk about dealing with anxiety um i know that this comes up a lot for people they ask me online they're saying i'm getting started in flight training and i feel anxious in the airplane i just can't get over it sometimes this happens in the real world i'll have pilots that are as far along as going for their commercial pilot certificate and they will talk about feeling anxious like and they they even they're even executing the they're using their their private certificate they're taking passengers up they're going flying with their girlfriends and then they call me and say hey i just don't feel comfortable i have this incredible anxiety when i fly the airplane i love doing this i want to keep doing this what can i do to sort of deal with my anxiety um and i do understand that some of this is built into the equation uh depending on how like the stakes of it all like for some of us for example i never feel anxiety sitting in the right seat going on a flight lesson or if i'm flying by myself it's just not something that i feel and and i do remember a long time ago like maybe when i first started practicing stalls that kind of thing feeling anxious but i don't feel anxiety anymore however when you put my wife in the plane and my three-year-old in the back and my 11 year old in the back and the dog and all of our bags all of a sudden i'm thinking okay what did i miss like what am i you know now all of a sudden it's not i don't know that i'm feeling anxious but somehow i don't feel as relaxed as i did on the third lesson of the day two days ago right i feel like a increased sense of responsibility maybe increased pressure so i think that the answer to anybody that's going through anxiety in an airplane is to first of all get with an instructor and explore the envelope a little bit more um also to hold on to that thought that we said up front where i really believe there are three things that can go wrong in a light airplane and that's about it there are fires failures and collisions and if you can successfully practice and mitigate those three risks as long as you're doing everything else smart you're flying the wing you're staying coordinated you're thinking in front of the plane you're going to be fine and so what that would do once you start to figure out what the real risks are it gets you focused on proper responses so it's like knowing where the problem areas are so becoming comfortable in the airplane is going to be like a two-prong strategy one is knowing where the problem areas are knowing what can really go wrong and making sure you feel prepared for those things in some cases being prepared for those things is maybe more than you've done in the past and i like to use fire as an example like everybody practices simulated engine failures i hope right that's a big one we have one engine if you're flying a single or if you're flying a twin we practice you know single-engine approaches a lot we always talk about what am i going to do if this engine fails so that's something that hopefully most of us feel pretty well prepared for maybe you could take it a little further than you've done in the past do an engine failure all the way to a full stop landing if you haven't done that at an airport if you're flying a twin make sure that you're having your cfi sort of surprise you at critical times not actually killing the motor but simulating that failure but the one that i feel like we we as pilots have a sort of ostrich approach to where we stick our heads in the sand is fire you know what would you do right now if the airplane lit on fire and it's kind of like uh you know i don't know i hope that doesn't happen or i would i would land and i would i would go down and i would land at this airport but the reality is if you look at the accident reports that that one risk if we distill it into three fire failure and collision the fire risk is pretty critical if that happens and statistically it is very very very unlikely for this to happen but if it happens you need to act and you need to act fast um there's got to be a fire extinguisher on board and you can forget going to an airport you need to land underneath the airplane now so if there's a cabin fire on board your process should pretty be pretty much be shut the fuel off shut the electrical off go into an emergency descent if possible during that emergency descent you should pull the fire extinguisher out you should discharge the fire extinguisher you should vent the cabin and then execute a forced landing at the bottom of that and the reason that is not practiced with diligence and training is because that's kind of a lot is it too much it's not so it's if you're like a weightlifter i promise you can get to lifting this amount of weight but you have to get with a cfi and you have to practice i mean i would practice just like that don't just simulate pulling the fire extinguisher out reach down and get it out of its cradle when i do flight reviews with people in their own airplanes i've had a number of clients where i'll say where's the fire extinguisher and they'll say like right down there by my left shin and i'll say grab it and they're like you know they can't quite get to the fire extinguisher and what comes out of that lesson is they're going to move the fire extinguisher to some place that's more accessible right so know if you can get to it um these are the types of things when you're distilling the risks into those three categories if you can get that level of practice in with an instructor and truly in your heart of hearts know that you are as as well prepared as you can possibly be for the three categories of risk that's going to make you feel less anxious about being in the airplane the other side of it in addition to knowing what the known risks are are knowing the envelope of the airplane so one of the maneuvers that i strongly recommend and i teach to all pilots whether they're commercial applicants student pilots private pilots is a lazy eight does anyone know what a lazy eight is it's it's it's kind of like uh if you don't know what it is it's like a figure eight like this right so it's a figure eight in the sky and if you could pin down the middle and sort of pick up the edges of the eight so it goes up like that and then up like that and back around right so almost like a skateboard half pipe you kind of go up one side and you come back down the middle and you go up the other side the lazy eight is a wonderful maneuver um if if you're interested in trying one there's a youtube video on our channel the finer points that sort of breaks down how how to fly it and why it's a wonderful maneuver but it's it's a maneuver that teaches you all the different edges of the envelope like teaches you how to leverage the secondary effects of the controls how to leverage the over banking tendency of the airplane as far as i know it's the only maneuver the only one in all of flight training that teaches you how the airplane over banks when you slow down in a turn which is a natural aerodynamic effect if you bank the airplane so much as two degrees and all you do is pull you're going to increase the bank naturally it's naturally going to overbank and the only maneuver that sort of shows you that is the lazy eight that's one that i strongly recommend another one i call stall exercises where you just slow the airplane down as far as you can preferably with the flight instruments covered not covered so you can't look at them you can look at them just cover them with one piece of paper i like to skewer a piece of paper over some knob on the panel so that you can peel the paper back to see them you're welcome to look just you have to get by a piece of paper and it's pretty cool even though it's even though the barrier i'm discussing is literally paper thin you will find that you look at them a lot less when you have to pull back a piece of paper as opposed to staring at them we want your eyes outside the airplane you can bring along a little dry erase marker and just make a little x it can be arbitrary in some ways the x i mean if i was with you and i could fly with you i would show you different marks to make on the window but think of it like a like a scope on a gun it just gives you a reference a little bit closer that's not some you know just not just a big wind screen but it's a little x reference so you can actually see the pitch in the yaw much more specifically and you slow the airplane down until the stall horn's on holding enough right rudder if you're in a single to prevent all that yawing and then just sort of let go and and you know trim the airplane up so that you could fly around like that hands off right and then from there hopefully you have an instructor with you while you're doing this you just kind of pull it into these little stalls not don't do anything to recover just pull back until the nose kind of falls on its own and then release the back pressure and so you're just kind of flying around in and out of the stall just feeling that edge of the envelope all right this type of work the lazy eight the stall exercises exploring these different edges of the envelope this is gonna make you feel more comfortable in the airplane and that's the second way to combat this anxiety i also think that just getting with an instructor more often is a way to combat the anxiety so through all this process to kind of summarize some of the stuff we've talked about you've you've developed these standard procedures for yourself you've written them down if we're emulating the professionals the professionals go back to training every six months they don't wait two years to go back to a cfi they go back every six months and they work on emergencies and that's what i strongly recommend for everybody if you can make a relationship with a cfi that's going to be the person that holds your standard operating procedures that's going to be the person that knows what to hold you accountable to you when you fly together that's going to be the person that works on the emergency procedures we discussed like the the fire or the engine failure that's also going to be the person that does these instrument covered stall exercises and lazy eights with you and go see that person every six months get into that recurrent training program just like the professionals have that will make you a safer pilot and hopefully there's ways and we don't need to talk about this but if you have that relationship with an instructor when it comes time to do a flight review or get signed off for a flight review that instructor is probably going to be right there to sign you off you know if i'm flying regularly with somebody i don't need to make it a whole separate day if i've been doing that kind of stuff with somebody on you know on the last time we do that or whatever i'll sign it off as a flight review if i feel confident that they're safe in the airplane how much time do we have all right just a couple minutes here that is we might not get through all 10 of these but fortunately like i said it's going to be a free book um all right let's skip to nine and ten which is decide on the ground and fly with an out you know training in california is great for a lot of reasons um you can make a career out of flight instructing because the weather is so darn predictable i can tell you with confidence what the weather is going to be next week at any given hour of the day in any part of the state which is pretty crazy but it makes flying fun i can plan family trips and all that it does however make me nervous when two of my students say to me hey we just bought a couple 172s in virginia we're going to fly out there on the airlines and bring them home because these guys don't know whether they don't know whether like you all know whether here in wisconsin that's for sure and i started flying in chicago flown all over the country so i really know that um there are things that my students just can't have they will not know until they get out there in the wild so this is a true story this happened to me and these guys call me and they say hey do you mind if we take you out to lunch so you can tell us a few things about cross-country flying that's you know so i said sure of course can't pass up a free lunch i'm a cfi and um but on the way over to lunch i'm thinking what in the world by the way they took me to mcdonald's how's that mcdonald's but um on the way over to mcdonald's i'm asking myself what in the world can i tell these guys and the time it takes to eat a big mac that's going to have any impact on their life whatsoever and so really i can only think of one thing and that's what i'm going to tell you guys now is when you're out there and i'm assuming by the way they're both my students so i'm assuming they do they're going to do all their standard procedures they're going to hold each other to those standard procedures they're going to so all that stuff is just given this next thing is something different and i told them what i'm telling you which is you're going to be out there at some point and i don't know what pressure is going to be on you but there will be pressure on you i don't know if it's pressure to because you're low on fuel or pressure because you're turning away from thunderstorms or pressure because an airport is closed or the hotel you have a reservation at won't pick you up past a certain hour i mean i really don't know there's going to be some pressure to go somewhere or do something when the decision becomes difficult and you'll know when that is when it becomes like something that you're thinking about trying to figure out you need to land the airplane and make that decision on the ground and if on the ground you decide that the right thing to do is get back in the airplane and keep flying then you'll get back in the airplane and you'll keep flying if it's not the right thing you'll figure something else out and that is also born out of my own experience and i would say 9 out of 10 times you do not get back in the airplane and keep flying which tells you something there's a statistic that is true in my own life that i'm not proud of and i can't i can't really reconcile but i like to share it with people to sort of illustrate how hard this is uh and this it goes something like this like i could i could sit here and tell you two dozen stories of times that i've gotten out of an airplane just like getting off a motorcycle and i've said to either myself or the person i'm flying with i'm really tired or like i'm too tired i shouldn't have been flying like i'm glad we stopped i'm really tired i can think of two dozen stories where i pushed it past the point that i know i should have pushed it i don't think i could tell you one story i probably can't even think of one where i canceled a mission that was critical because i thought i was too tired so there's some sort of data disconnect there there's some disconnect like if i how how can i prevent myself from racking up two dozen stories about times i was too tired in the airplane um and so if you just put your feet on the ground go to the pilot's lounge have a soda look at the weather thing start analyzing your options and thinking through the problem you were trying to work out in the airplane while the airplane's not barreling along at 120 knots or whatever speed you're flying you probably won't get back in the airplane and keep going maybe you will and certainly you can if it's the right thing go for it but make your decision on the ground and the last thing number 10 we skipped over a few in the middle so you guys are gonna have to wait for the free download uh but the last one is just always fly with an out make sure that you don't fly yourself into a corner make sure that you always have an out you're always aware of where it is uh the real end of the story of when i told you i didn't find those cow plugs right in the when i didn't do my walk around with any diligence but i did it like i was sleepwalking and i missed two red cow plugs which by the way sometimes i think about i mean this is a tightly cowled composite airplane and i was flying with the only cooling air inlets covered and i had one temperature gauge and it was an oil gauge sometimes i asked myself how long would it have taken for that engine to get so hot that the fiberglass lit on fire right like how close was i really to an in-flight fire i don't think i'll ever know because i got lucky but after i did my my proper pre-flight and my proper walk around we did take off we didn't make it far because the thunderstorms and the storms came in around us and they were we were vfr so i could see them coming i could see them on the weather radar and i had one out and that was down downwind away from the thunderstorms a little town called terrell texas anyone ever been to terrell texas all right so you know there's a pizza hut in a bowling alley all right well anyway terrell texas was my out and when it got to be such that i realized we were flying and we couldn't get any further the weather was overwhelming us we just turned toward terrell it was about a two-minute flight away from the storms we landed at terrell we tied down the airplane and that's where we got stuck for the next six days terrible taxes but anyway that's the idea make sure that you don't fly yourself into a corner make sure you have an out and that you always know what that out is does anybody have any questions because we have 15 seconds yes sir yeah um so the question was about the download um it's not available yet it'll be available this fall it's my the book the top 10 things all pilots should know but if you're looking for anything related to me the the current book i have standard operating procedures our ground school app the videos the podcast anything it's all at learnthefinerpoints.com all right i want to thank you all for taking some time at this amazing airshow to come listen to me talk i really appreciate you being here i'm jason miller and thank you very much

Channel: AOPALive

Views: 29,571

Keywords: AOPA, flying, pilot, aircraft, airplane, airport, aviation, general aviation, aerospace, FAA, airway, avionics, aopa live, aopa live this week

Id: FOBTWf2r2CU

Length: 45min 21sec (2721 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021