In article ,
RK Henry wrote:

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:47:02 -0500, T wrote:

Find a school or instructor who uses a simulator to train. A plane in
the air is a bad classroom.

That may have been true when I trained. Screaming over noise made it
impossible to student and instructor to communicate and an analysis
had to wait until you were on the ground. Now everyone uses an
intercom, creating a completely different training environment.

It's certainly true that headsets and intercomms have made the airplane
cockpit a vastly better place to teach. I still think there is value in
taking time on the ground to go over what you're going to do, and taking
time on the ground to reviewing what you've done.

On the ground, if I'm not getting my point across, I can stop, pull out a
reference book, draw on the whiteboard, etc. I'm also not distracted by
watching for traffic, listening to ATC, keeping us from busting our
clearance, double-checking that the student isn't about to kill us both,
etc. The student is also not distracted by watching the tach click over at
a buck or two a minute.

On the other hand, real time in the air (especially in IMC, and especially
in challenging conditions like turbulence, T-storms, icing, or night) is a
something that cannot be simulated (at least not in the kind of sims any of
us can afford time in).

I did an interesting X/C last week with a student. IFR, but we weren't in
clouds for more than a couple of minutes the whole day. Icing, flying over
open bodies of water, and hitting our designated time slot to meet customs
were the concerns. Most of the education value of the flight was working
to get in-flight route and altitude changes from ATC to keep us out of
icing and over land, and dealing with re-routes that messed up the time we
told customs to expect us. You don't get much experience working through
those sorts of real-life problems in a sim.