What would YOU eliminate from the Private Pilot training curriculum?

As things stand, the FAR's are what they are, the NAS is what it is,
and the PTS is what it is. The typical private pilot training
curriculum is something of a joke - even when it actually exists and is
followed, it's merely an organized process for making sure the
applicant arrives at the checkride with the Part 61 (or 141) experience
requirements met and with the ability to pass the oral/practical
(meaning answer questions on PTS topics and fly PTS maneuvers to PTS
tolerances). Nothing can be removed from it because in the interest of
cutting costs, it has already been pared down to the bare minimum.

In order to streamline the process of making pilots, we would have to
bring the FAR's and the NAS into the 21st century. Here are the
changes I would make:

Revamp the weather briefing system. It's still a holdover from the
days when bandwidth was critically limited. AIRMET TANGO? WIE UFN?
Hooks and dots that must be memorized to know that you have light rain
and not showers? Get over it. If you need to condense the chart and
thus use symbols, they should be defined in a legend on the chart -
like they are on sectionals, low altitude enroutes, and all the other
charts people actually use. Write the text weather out in plain
english. Spend the time that need no longer be spent on memorizing
weather symbols and abbreviations on teaching about how weather
actually works.

Change the PTS concept. Right now, the private PTS is full of
maneuvers that have no real value AS THEY ARE TESTED. They all have
real value when you understand what they're actually about, and they
all need to be taught - but not as they're tested.

Consider slow flight. Why do we teach it? So the student can practice
control of the airplane at critically slow airspeeds - airspeeds so
slow that we normally encounter them only in the flare for landing and
maybe on rotation. This makes sense - it's hard to get any good at
something you can only practice for a couple of seconds at a time, only
a dozen times on even a good day. So how do we teach it?

We teach it at altitude. This is sensible. You don't want to teach
this at 25 ft, or even 250. Too much chance of something going wrong.
So we do it at 2500 ft. But we also require the student hold altitude,
+/- 100 ft. At 2500 ft, you will not judge altitude to within 100 ft
by looking outside the airplane. You will need to look inside, at the
panel. This is the LAST place you want the student looking during the
landing flare. So just by teaching the PTS maneuver before solo (as
required by Part 91) you are developing bad habits in the student -
habits that will make it harder for him to learn to land.

We SHOULD be doing slow flight without reference to the altimeter at
all, and in fact without reference to ANY instruments. That's because
the only time the skills developed are relevant, meaning in the flare,
you need to be 100% outside. But that's not the way the maneuver is
tested. As tested, it has no real value. Any flight intructor worth
his salt can tell if the student had solid skills in airplane control
at critically low airspeeds after one takeoff and one landing anyway.
The only problem is that if you drop slow flight from the PTS, it will
get dropped from most training syllabi - and there goes ANY exposure
the student would ever get to flight at critically slow airspeeds.

Slow flight is only one example. In reality, the way we test MOST of
the PTS maneuvers is inherently flawed, and makes extra work for the
student with no real benefit.

Streamline the regulations. We spend too much damn time teaching them
because they're too complex by half. A medical is good for 36 claendar
months, not three years. But a student pilot certificate is only good
for 24 calendar months. But you need 3 takeoffs and landings in the
last 90 days, not three months. And winds aloft are given in degrees
true, but tower winds are in degrees magnetic. And distances are
always in nautical miles, but visibility is always in statute miles.
And ATC will give you VFR flight following but won't open your VFR
flight plan (generating a strip manually instead). And a VFR tower
will close your IFR flight plan but not your VFR flight plan. WTF?
Pick a sensible system and stick with it.

Of course the design of the aircraft has its own issues. Even an
advanced aircraft like a Cirrus still has a mixture control. We've had
altitude-compensating carburetors since about 1938, but here we are in
the 21st century and even the most advanced GA airplane being made
still has a mixture control. And magnetos. Bloody-be-damned magnetos.
So we spend time on engine management. How to cold start. How to hot
start. How to lean for best power vs. best economy. Don't think it
makes much difference? A couple of local CFI's recently ran a C-152
out of gas. They used the 75% endurance chart, but they leaned for
best power (lean until RPM drop, then enrich to max RPM) and ran out of
gas at 3.2 hours, just a few minutes from home, when the chart clearly
showed an endurance of 4.2 hours - at best economy. For that matter,
why are we still seeing new airplanes shipped with the inherently
inaccurate (by design) ball-and-float gauges and no fuel flow
measurement, when a set of capacitive gauges and a fuel totalizer for
marine applications go for less than $100 each? So instead we spend
all this time on fuel management - and people still crash. If the
planes had accurate fuel gauges and fuel totalizers, how much time
would we really need to spend on fuel management?

Of course the truth is that the aircraft are the way they are because
of the FAA. In fact, until the FAA changes the way it does business,
it will not be possible to streamline private pilot training. Nothing
can be removed from the syllabus at this point.

Michael