"Mortimer Schnerd, RN" mschnerdatcarolina.rr.com wrote in message
...

Good for you. Now you might get people to actually ride with you. G

I'm lucky I ride with me. I told the examiner I felt like I was flying like
an 18-year-old in a Honda Civic yesterday. What impressed me the most was
tips on providing a gentle experience for passengers.

On the way back he also discussed how he thought the Private Pilot
curriculum ought to put more emphasis on stall avoidance rather than
recovery; teach 'em how to recover, but more importantly, teach them how to
recognize that they're headed for a stall situation before they get there.
He said when you're learning stall recovery, you're watching the airspeed
and slowly anticipating the deliberate stall; in reality, he says, people's
reaction time often makes it impossible to recover from a stall because
unlike in training they weren't prepared for it to happen. In those cases
it would have been better had they been trained to identify and correct an
impending stall situation and avoid it before it became necessary to try a
sudden stall recovery.

Seriously, I had many people who were originally leery at the thought of
riding
in a GA aircraft calmed right down when I mentioned I had a commercial
license. It made all the difference to them.

He emphasized that a single bad landing can turn off a prospective GA
enthusiast forever which is why when possible it's better to use a little
more runway taking off and landing to ensure that the pax feel like they're
in a Cadillac than to try to impress them by dropping out of the sky and
planting the wheels on the numbers. He says with pax and sufficient runway
he doesn't apply full power on takeoff until he reaches 40mph; that way,
they don't feel like they're being launched off a carrier deck or something.
I think I learned more from the checkride than the actual training.

As for me, it meant I could start the search for hours in earnest.

How did you go about it?

-c