How can we teach real-world flying to our students?
Hey, MZeroA Nation, Jason Schappert here, and you are listening to--
Is it bad if I say it's my favorite podcast?
It is the CFI, Certificated Flight Instructor Podcast.
And, today, we're going to be talking about instilling and teaching the principles
of real-world flying to our learners.
Remember, that is the new buzzword.
We're not to use the word, "students," anymore.
They are our learners.
So, I'm still trying to break the chain of the primacy
of saying "student" for so many years.
So, if you will work with me to help me start using the phrase, "learners,"
and those of you who are learners, and we all are, really,
but those of you who are learners, when your instructors talk to you,
make sure they know, "Hey, I am your learner right now,"
just so they know.
It's a polite correction.
It's like when someone comes up to me and says,
"Jason, I'm getting ready for my private pilot license, my PPL,"
and a little part of me, just inside,
it takes everything I have to breathe and say,
"It's actually a private pilot certificate."
Maybe, that's just a weird Jasonism.
Maybe, I'm the weird one.
Have you ever thought about that?
Maybe, I am the strange one.
Anyways, I want to talk with you all about real-world flying
and real-world flying from an instructor's perspective.
How do we instill real-world techniques to our learners?
Let me just briefly take 60 to 120 seconds to recap this week's video.
I'm sure you saw the video on YouTube getting us ready for real-world flying.
And, I talked about it from a flight planning standpoint.
I shared how I love VFR flight plans.
I believe their main purpose is for search and rescue.
And, I shared how I am a fan of, if you have a fuel stop,
multiple VFR flight plans.
So, every time, basically, if I shut down the engine,
that is I need to close my flight plan.
That is a flight plan, essentially.
And, if you're wondering what I'm talking about, please,
go back two days ago to Tuesday, last Tuesday in April,
if you're listening to this as a recording of April 2021,
in the Principles of Mastery Series.
There will be more to this Principles of Mastery Series, too,
because I owe you some great flying footage as well.
I, then, spoke about, in the IFR realm, because this could be the CFII podcast,
just as much as this is the CFI PODCAST.
In the instrument realm, always file into a fix,
not just filing Ocala to,
I think in the example I used Orlando Executive,
not going from Ocala, OCF to ORL,
but OCF to a fix on an approach at ORL, and then ORL.
And, that's the actual destination.
That's how I actually file everything as well.
Why do I do that?
In the event of loss comms, ATC, myself, everybody,
we know where we are going when that happens.
And, that makes our lives just so much easier.
So, I'm a big fan of that.
What else can we be doing
and should we be doing to instill confidence in our learners?
I believe, as flight instructors, we are truly practical psychologists,
and it's important for us we have to be able to go
reverse-engineer the job to be done,
with the goal here of what our learners are really after.
Let me give you an example.
I don't believe you teach real-world flying the same to an individual who says,
"Jason, airlines are my dream,"
versus,
"Jason, I've got a great career.
I'm 50-something years old.
I just want to go fly to see my kids before they start having kids
while they're off in college,"
or whatever it is.
And, maybe, that's their goal, instead.
Real-world flying needs to be taught in the vein
of the type of real-world flying that learner will be doing.
Now, we also need to be smart enough to say, "You know what?"
They may say they just want this for a hobby
but they end up being what we call a career changer down the line.
They go, "Man, I really like this thing.
I think I'll just live it up and go be a corporate pilot as a second career."
So, you still have to be prepping.
And, this isn't saying we're prepping any less.
We are still preparing our learners to the highest level.
I want everyone pursuing aviation mastery.
Mastery is a quest, not a score on a test.
I've been saying that a lot lately, but it resonates so true.
We're pushing everybody towards mastery.
But, the person who comes to me and says, "I just want to go see the kids,"
I'm going to gear our training around that common goal.
If you live in Florida and the kids are going to college in Tennessee,
if budget and time allow,
you better believe one of our long cross-countries
is going to be up to Tennessee and back,
because I want you to know what you don't know.
To see what you've never seen, to learn these sort of things,
to be on that long of a trip,
to be able to prepare your whole family to go on that trip,
because how do you prepare yourself, your spouse, and the dog, let's say,
all to go from Florida to Tennessee to see the kids
because they're in college when all you've done
as a student pilot, a learner pilot, is that what they're going to call it?
I'm not sure.
That all you've done as a young learner is beat up the traffic pattern,
go to the practice area, do a few prescribed cross-countries?
You've never gone on a trip long enough where you have to have
one, maybe two, fuel stops.
You've never gone on a trip and had to think about,
"Wow, it was really bumpy.
I don't know if my spouse would like that," or, "You know what?
The dog is not going to like this one bit.
I might want to talk to the vet about getting the dog some medicine
to calm it down while we're in the plane because I don't need that."
And, you don't think about these things
when you're just going to the practice area.
You also don't think about those things, I'm speaking from the learner perspective,
our learners just think,
"I've got my certificate, I'm going to Tennessee."
When we need to educate our learners by not only giving them
that real-world experience but giving them real-world experience that,
"Hey, your first flight with your spouse probably shouldn't be
the four-hour flight to Tennessee with a fuel stop."
It should probably be, "Let's go out to the practice area.
Let me just fly around town and show you some of the sights around town.
Look, there's the Walmart we shop at."
those sorts of things, to start with, and work them into them.
Even if they're super gung-ho, they love roller coasters,
you say they'll never get nauseous.
It doesn't matter, work them into it slowly.
Don't try to go far places right off the bat.
And, you yourself, and this is speaking from an instructor,
Jason speaking to a learner,
you yourself need to build up your experience with new passengers,
new people, new animals, whatever it is they're looking to fly.
CFIs, you have to understand their goal, show them their goal,
that their goal is attainable,
and then help them--
"create" is the word I'm looking for, help them create the steps to get there.
Because, you don't go from temporary airmen certificate
all the way to Tennessee from Florida.
It just doesn't work that way.
You've got to work them into that.
Now, you say, "That's cool, Jason.
That makes sense.
But, what if they want to be an airline pilot?
What if they want to be an airline pilot
and you yourself have never been an airline pilot?
How do you help someone with that?"
Well, I guarantee, first off, there's someone at the airport
who can help serve as such a mentor and an assistant
to help them in such a process.
But, you may not have the airline experience.
And, maybe you do.
Maybe, you have experience in the jobs they want.
But, you know what it takes to be a professional pilot, don't you?
You know the process it's going to take.
If you're looking at someone who's at zero-time right now
and marches into your flight school and says,
"Jason, it's my dream to be an airline pilot,"
and here's you sitting over on the side listening to his story, going, "Man,--"
and you've got 1,000 hours right now, whatever it may be, and you're going,
"Man, I've walked that walk.
While I may not be or have been or have a desire to be an airline pilot,
I can help them from zero to 1,000, zero to 1,500,"
because isn't that walk about the same for everybody?
Very similar for everybody?
They're going to change, whether it's part 61, 141.
Maybe, I can't make that generalized of a statement,
but from zero to 1,500,
there's a lot of similarities in our stories.
So, don't ever discount yourself as being a great mentor to somebody
just because your goals or what you've done doesn't align with their goals,
because you were once a zero-time student with a dream as well.
And, guess what.
You probably had the same time constraints they're going to have.
You have the same money issues that they're going to have.
You have the same weather delays, checkride cancellations.
You have blazed this trail before, CFIs, and this is your opportunity.
I know this podcast is on real-world flying
but what is more real-world than weather delays,
maintenance issues, checkride delays, taxi, all the way up,
do the run-up to get a bad mag check
and just come back with your tail between your legs disappointed
because you wanted to fly?
That is real-world flying.
And, it's important for you to be a beacon of light
during those trying times.
It's so easy when we're a flight instructor, sometimes,
to forget where we've come from and how hard it was to get there
and how we overcame those disappointments,
whether we overcame them in the best way possible
or not the best way possible.
Both, you'll learn from.
You've learned from your great CFIs.
You've learned from your good CFIs.
And, you've learned from your poor CFIs.
And, we've all had those.
And, even if you haven't had a poor CFI, I mean just poor in quality,
even if you haven't had a poor CFI,
even your good and great CFIs have had off-days before,
and you thought, "Wow, that's not like them.
I don't want to be like that.
When I have an off-day, I'm going to say,
'IMSAFE checklist can't pass it, not today.'"
Real-world flying starts with you, starts with your journey.
Did you watch the MZeroA 14th birthday presentation?
If not, it's up there.
I really, really enjoyed it.
I don't want to say it's great content,
because I have a very, very strong bias to that.
I hope the comments and the kind words speak for themselves alone.
It was actually quite different.
We got to share the story of MZeroA,
and my journey over the past 14 years to get to this moment in time
speaking to you right now, which, as you'll hear in the story,
there were many, many times that you and I wouldn't be talking.
In fact, you and I actually shouldn't be talking
because of all the adversities I had to overcome.
And, you have your story, too.
What was our buzzword during that webinar?
It was "foundation."
"Foundation" was the word.
You see, you have the foundation that these learners would kill to have.
You might think, "I'm just a flight instructor.
I'm just this.
I'm just 1,000 hours away from my dream of 1,500 hours to 18."
You could think all these things or you could see it half-full and go,
"Man, I am just building my foundation.
I am still building it.
I am teaching students who would kill to have my logbook,
who would kill to have the experience and the knowledge I have in my head."
So, you can't take that lightly.
You have a gift, and you are a light
and you need to shine and share that with your learners.
And, that's going to prove so vitally important.
I hope you see and can read between the lines
that we are talking real-world flying,
because nothing is more real-world than where you have been
and how you use your experiences to benefit your learners.
I'll give you one more illustration,
then I'll let you wrap this up and enjoy the rest of your day.
And, by the way, don't forget, please, we produce three other podcasts,
the Private Pilot Podcast, the Instrument Pilot Podcast,
the Commercial Pilot Podcast.
Encourage your learners to listen to all of them.
I would recommend even you go back and humbly listen to them, as well,
on your commute to work, whatever it is.
And, then, one last little plug, don't forget
"Pass Your Commercial Pilot Checkride" is now out on Audible,
if that's of an interest to you as well, or your learner.
So, private, instrument, commercial audiobooks up as well.
Anyways,
one last little bit to really share here, as we bring this home.
And, I'll teach it through a story.
And, that's actually the premise of this, is teaching through stories.
The content that we produce here at MZeroA.com is a collective effort.
I don't know everything.
I can humbly tell you I don't know everything.
How many livestreams do I do?
Between the ground school member-only webinar,
that's two hours every week.
And, then, Inflight Coffee.
So, I am live, at least, not including the Zooms we've been doing,
but guaranteed,
I am live three to three and a half hours every single week.
And, you can imagine,
I get asked questions there that I don't always know the answer to.
And, you have to humbly say,
"I don't know that answer, but I know where to find that answer."
You also have to, as an educator, not just an aviation educator,
but just an educator, as a leader, and you are leaders, by the way,
you have to be able to take the complex and break it into stories.
One thing I'll do when the team is working
to create a lot of this collaborative content is,
by the time the content hits my desk,
it is checked for grammar and checked for facts,
and everything is great.
And, then, I can look at it and go, "You know what?
This is on in-flight emergencies or nighttime emergencies."
And, I can say, "Man, I should share right here my story
where I picked up carb ice at night and the engine quit temporarily."
And, I put in there, "Jason's carb ice at night story."
And, we go in there, and I can take the facts,
add my foundation, my real-world experience, to it.
And, you might be saying, "Jason, I only have 500 hours.
I've never had any--
One time the vacuum light came on."
That's a story.
We all have stories.
You've blown a tire you have found something on pre-flight,
you all have stories.
Just because you downplay them doesn't make them any less important.
You took off when the wind says it was 360 at 10,
and it was really 360 at 20, gusts 30.
Mother nature changes.
That's the premise of that.
So, you have your stories.
You have your foundation.
I don't care how much time you have.
You've got those stories.
You have this foundation already.
And, I need you to capitalize on it and use it with your learners.
So, MZeroA Nation, you are such just an amazing, amazing blessing to us.
I love this podcast.
Of the four podcasts, as you can imagine, this is fourth,
if we put them in order as the most popular to listen to.
But, it was funny.
I was actually talking to Tom.
Tom edits the audio of these podcasts.
Coach Ray edits the video of these podcasts,
if you're watching this on YouTube or Facebook.
I was talking to Tom,
and he was looking over our podcast stats in the other day.
He said, "Jason, if you look at the MZeroA podcasts in the aviation category,
all-time, from Inception, not week-by-week or year-by-year,
I'm talking the history as long as
the iTunes aviation category has been in business,"
that date I couldn't tell you.
I'm sure Tom knows it.
"That all four podcasts are in the top 25 most-listened-to podcasts,
from private, all the way down to CFI."
It's outstanding.
So, we own four of the top 25 spots.
I don't think anybody else can say that.
So, thank you Tom and Ray and Amanda and the whole team for all your hard work,
but especially, on this as well.
It's just a great, great joy.
And, we're reaching people, and you are reaching people, CFIs.
Here you are, thinking that we are a blessing to you.
I'd encourage you, it's quite the other way around.
You're a blessing to us.
Where does my learning take place?
My learning takes place in the comments section of these videos.
My learning takes place in my email inbox.
My learning takes place when I review the support team's
thousands of tickets they get every single month.
You know, a few months ago, I sent away a survey.
This survey is now two months old.
I am still poring through it every single response.
I'm talking, probably, over 10,000 responses in there.
I'm just reading over everyone, and I learn so much.
I learn how to be a better educator, a better leader, a better businessman,
a better pilot.
I hear your stories.
And, I'm on a tangent now.
I hope this passion comes through to you.
And, I hope you can take some of this passion,
some of this confidence, whatever you want to call it,
and maybe you've been down on yourself a little bit lately,
I hope you can borrow some of my passion, borrow some of my confidence,
if you see it there,
and utilize it to light the spark inside of you once again,
as well, for your learners.
So, MZeroA Nation, just love you guys to death.
You are so, so amazing.
Can't wait to read all your comments,
once again, read your emails, everything else.
I'll see you on upcoming Zoom webinars as well.
We're diving next month into Mock Checkride May.
That's going to prove to be a lot of fun as well.
All the podcasts will relate to mock checkrides, et cetera.
So, we're looking forward to that.
Have a blessed, amazing, outstanding rest of your day.
And most importantly, remember,
that a good pilot is always learning.
Have a great day, everyone. We'll see you.