"Joy of Soaring" Book

On 9/6/2011 1:08 PM, ray conlon wrote:
On Sep 6, 2:37 pm, Bill wrote:
On Sep 5, 12:24 pm, wrote:

The SSA has recently mailed a letter to the membership regarding the
continuing unacceptable accident rate. Studies have shown one of the
primary reasons for a high accident rate is a fundemental lack of
knowledge. The Joy of Soaring was written as a simple coffee table
book. It was never designed to be a flight training manual.

Tom Knauff

Right on all points.

Bill Daniels

I always found any knowledge is a good thing, the Joy of Soaring is a
wonderful place to start and expand on from it's basic concepts,
speaking for myself I am/was no Chuck Yeager and anything I can learn
from is welcomed..

"What Ray said."

N.B.: I greatly respect Tom Knauff's opinions regarding instruction
methodologies, the importance of the law of primacy, which books do a
better/not-so-good job presenting the basics, etc. Why?

Quantity of students instructed-to-license:
Tom Knauff - Lots, over 3+ decades.
Me - Zero.

That said, and with a nod to the law of primacy's power over what Tom calls
the reptilian part of our brain (which Tom argues takes over in moments of
great stress), the rational part of my brain genuinely struggles with the
precept that 'proper training' in conjunction with 'accurate self-generated
continuing analyses' are INcapable of overcoming the law of primacy.

In a nutshell, that's what (any) training is all about.

In other words, even if a person has - for whatever reason and in whatever
manner - managed to initially learn some
bad/incorrect/potentially-life-threatening information prior to obtaining
'Knauff-worthy' instruction on the matter, I'm inclined to believe that the
new information can indeed permanently and successfully replace the
old/bad/incorrect information...even in moments of great stress.

For example, consider stalls. I dare say some measurable percentage of
existing glider pilots once thought pulling back on the stick was 'the thing
to do,' even if only when 10 years old. I also believe it's possible for this
bad information to be 'trained out of wannabe pilots.' It may take more time,
and it's probably the wise instructor who tends to probe new-to-them,
ab-initio students' concepts of certain potentially life-threatening
situations/ideas/concepts (e.g. stalls - what they are and what to do about
incipient ones). In any event, I'd expect some insightful (aka 'sneaky')
instruction to see if said student really *has* absorbed the correct idea(s)
and applies 'em when immediately necessary; in hindsight, I realized my
instructor did precisely this. Consequently I tend to think it's somewhat
misguided thinking to hold 'bad == *initial* == ideas' up as the primary
contributor to the U.S. soaring community's dismal safety record of the past
two summers.

That's not to suggest some misguided thinking has NOT contributed, though.

Hence, "What Ray said." Information is good. Prior bogus 'knowledge' (may?
can? might?) make it more difficult to retrain us, but should not make it
impossible to do so.

Bob W.

P.S. I rather enjoyed "The Joy of Soaring" when it was loaned to me way back
in 1972 when I got into the sport, because I inhaled anything I could get my
hands on regarding soaring and flight. I never felt it hurt me in any
way...nor did I ever imagine it was the end all and be all in written soaring
flight instruction.