My primary flight instructor said firmly that first day of training those many years ago, “Buy the Irvin N. Gleim book of private pilot FAA questions and answers, go through it three times, then go take the written test. As for the rest of it, remember what I teach you; you won’t need anything else. That’s all you’ll need for your checkride.”

That was this man’s sage advice for this fledgling student. Now, I aced the written test. I walked away from that same test, however, with no better than a fragmented understanding of the material. Not surprisingly, his wisdom, his fatherly advice came back to bite me several times during my career.

How often, I look back now and wonder, sometimes aloud since that time, taking his advice to heart, was I wholly ill-prepared for any of my tests? I wondered also if it is possible for anyone else to grasp how frustrating that philosophy was for me, for someone who did not know better.

Well, most beginners don’t know better. Flying is so vastly different from anything most people have ever attempted or will attempt that we rely upon our instructors, these sages of aviation who know all and see all, to prepare us, to keep us safe, to teach us what we need to know to fly safely. After all, we don’t know what we don’t know. If I am not taught something, how am I to know that I’m lacking in the knowledge? Furthermore, how am I to know this thing I don’t know might be important somewhere down the road?

Before commencing every flight, a combination of both regulations and common sense require that we obtain all information pertaining to the safety of the flight, including weather, runway lengths of intended use, fuel requirements, etc. Yes, but what about the part before we get to that point in our flying careers, the part where we are not seasoned aviators, but only empty vessels? We trust everything our instructors say.

I wonder now what this nice young man and good pilot was thinking when he offered his years-of-experience-in-a-nutshell advice about gaining the knowledge I needed to fly safely. Did it occur to him that the concept of both regulations and common sense requiring exploring all resources to gain a thorough understanding about the impending flight could be used as a model for me, his student? That is, if I were to use every available resource to gather information such that it could possibly make me a well-rounded pilot, that having access to those resources might actually make me just that.

Instead of allowing me to learn from a book, preferably several of them, thus having ready access to the resource therein to study at will, drawing again and again upon that reserve, he handicapped me by insisting that he was the fount of aviation knowledge and wisdom. With an activity as complex as learning to fly, did he actually expect his telling me something once or twice over the course of my training, even if he did have the presence of mind, a memory flawless, capable of recalling every minutiae, would be enough for me to remember it, to discuss it in detail with my examiner, only to rely upon it later when circumstances demanded it be recalled?

So, when we flew together and he occasionally ordered “right rudder” when climbing out after takeoff, I dutifully complied, not knowing why the heck he was asking for that. He neither explained nor was he consistent in his instruction. I would press the right rudder pedal those few times he asked for it. I held it there for a few seconds, then, since he never said anything else about it, I released it and was met by his silence. Throughout my training, I struggled to understand why right rudder would be applied what amounted to only once in a blue moon.

Since we are bearing our souls here, difficult as it may be to hear, even harder to believe, harder still to admit, I did not learn about P-factor and left-turning tendencies until I was in training to become an instructor. Consequently, when I began teaching, still feeling that gnawing disappointment suffering years those handicaps, all of those things I was not taught because I did not know what someone forgot or was not interested enough to tell me, wanting to be a better instructor myself, I began demonstrating left turning tendencies to my students on the first flight.

Referring to my tragically-insufficient, frustrating, lonely primary training, I said to my students, “My primary instructor occasionally ordered ‘right rudder’ on the climb out, but never said why. You have the benefit of my not only telling you why, but of showing you what the book is talking about. Now, there will be a correlation.”

It is interesting that this primary instructor of mine himself suffered from handicaps in his own training. He admitted he had accumulated no fewer than 1,200 hours in airplanes before he learned the proper way to takeoff, then only after he was an instructor already. So, where was his instructor’s head (to use my mother’s pet admonishment) when it came time to impart his wisdom to the man who tried to teach me? My instructor had to learn this on his own, at some future time, by someone who harbored the interest and took the time to teach him.

Consequently, my instructor taught me well and early the proper way to take off in an airplane. But in my case, what would this man have sacrificed urging me to buy a book or two about the fundamentals of flight, perhaps another on aviation weather, and still another on regulations? Doing so would have made my flying and testing life considerably less frustrating, preparing me better for the cockpit. I would not have felt so far behind the power curve. In retrospect, the only other advantage having this young man as my instructor is that he taught me, only by default, to become a more conscientious instructor when the time finally arrived for me to teach.

A friend years ago decided to train for her commercial pilot’s license. She found an instructor with access to a C-172 RG, an airplane for some strange reason dubbed the “Cutlass,” a name that makes the airplane sound about as vestigial as my father’s Oldsmobile.

At any rate, this girl embarked upon her commercial training with her own private and instrument training solid and intact, taught by a man who was conscientious and thorough. She complained to me at various junctures that this new instructor she had found was by all accounts “terrified” to, for instance, follow stalls all the way through the break, then recover. According to my friend, this fellow demonstrated, thus taught, stalls as imminent only, with recovery to follow immediately from that point.

Apparently, his literal fear of the stall break almost paralyzed him. My friend had had proper stall training. To her, following through to the break is nothing to fear. In fact, she ended up teaching her instructor what the different aerodynamic stalls are supposed to look like.

Now where did this man learn that behavior, the fear, this actual terror? Well, he learned it from his instructor who, in turn, learned it from his instructor and so on, ad infinitum. Yet, that man himself still had to fly with and demonstrate those very maneuvers to some now-distant, perhaps forgotten, still at the time well-intentioned FAA examiner, what is now so many years ago.

It is this very inconsistency among instructors that fueled the FAA’s determination years ago to give the initial flight instructor checkride. The unfortunate aftermath of that policy is that the problem of inconsistency in teaching methods, as well as the inadequate skills and dissemination of quality information still exists within the aviation community. The paramount reason this information is placed within the confines of a textbook is because there simply is too much information, a plethora of detail, the minutiae too vast for the instructor to remember to tell his students.

FAA inspectors do not ride along with us in the cockpit when we teach. The Agency bestows upon the instructor the privilege and the responsibility of teaching our students to fly. That actual instruction, however, must be drawn from a reservoir of wisdom, facts, and experience so vast that only through both our commitment and common sense will we leave no stone unturned in our quest to produce the best possible pilot.

The instructor applicant flying to the standards of the FAA examiner on that particular day assures the examiner only that this pilot can fly to a certain standard. It does not assure the examiner or the rest of us, for that matter, the quality of that pilot as a teacher.

Instructors must realize that we are like parents raising small children. What we do, what we say, and what we teach or do not teach, how we behave, dress, our demeanor, attitude, and our decorum, good or not so good, will influence the thoughts, actions, habits, the attitude, and, ultimately, the longevity of potentially generations of pilots.

Those who teach will have their own idiosyncrasies, their own anxieties and fears they bring with them into the cockpit, even their own level of skill, developing their own methods accordingly, as well as what they feel is important information to impart. We instructors must recognize that what our students learn from us, in more ways than one, in far too many unfortunate cases, will stay with them for life.

Watching a home video the other day of an instructor teaching his fledgling student how land an airplane, it suddenly dawned on me the reason pilots develop so many bad habits.

The student pilot in the video is doing everything, not wrong, as such, but to the level all of us instructors remember each one of our own students doing at that point in his flying career: base to final overshooting centerline, too high, too low, leveling off too high, too low, chasing the runway centerline, too much power, too little, behind the power curve, ad infinitum. Don’t get me wrong, I am not criticizing him. He has only a few flight hours. He doesn’t know better. I did that, too, as did every other person who has ever learned to fly an airplane.

This landing an airplane business may be, arguably, the most difficult task in the whole process of becoming a private pilot. It requires concentration, good judgement, dedication to the task at hand, quick thinking, depth perception, ready response, coordination, multitasking, a sterile cockpit. So, while this student is applying his mental faculties learning a task so complex, why is his instructor complicating the process, compounding this student’s stress, stretching to the breaking point his already overtaxed multitasking capability by teaching him touch and goes at the same time?

While touch and goes admittedly save time and money in the short term, how much of either they actually save becomes food for thought if the student takes longer to master the landings because he now is being asked to learn too many things at once. A touch and go sounds and looks a simple-enough concept, but is a skill best mastered once the student actually has learned how to fly.

Touch and goes require certain finesse. Performing a T & G, we are not just landing the airplane and controlling her on the landing rollout. We are landing her and controlling her on the landing rollout, while we are dividing our attention to, in this order, shutting off carburetor heat, retracting the flaps, neutralizing trim, then advancing the throttle.

As though that’s not enough, the sudden increase in power affects her handling on the runway, so we have to be ready for that. A quick check of our airspeed, even if the student can remember under all that pressure just where the airspeed indicator actually is, will alert him if he is ready to rotate. But wait, will he be ready for that crosswind he has since forgotten about, that he was bravely trying to master only a few seconds ago crossing the threshold?

From what I can gather of the competence of the student in the video, of any student at his level of competence, in my experience, is that what he is being expected to learn, when he is being asked to learn it, is an unfair expectation. It simply is too much information to absorb, too much skill to learn all at once.

The point in all this is not to belabor a point that may already have been conceptualized and complied with by more responsible instructors. It is to illustrate that despite what the more naive among us may hope, despite what we may hear, there is no standard in aviation training.

Teaching someone to fly involves all of those things we learned about human behavior: levels of learning, domains of learning, and barriers to learning. It also includes, unfortunately, all of those things that no one, not even that well-intentioned FAA examiner himself during that initial instructor checkride, can control: the bad habits, poor skills, good ideas or bad, fears, weaknesses, bravado, overconfidence or lack thereof that this instructor applicant absorbed from his own instructor, who, in turn, is a product of his instructor’s good or not so good training.

Students, we learned from Fundamentals of Teaching, emulate their instructors. They are like little sponges, just like my own children were way back when. They do what we do, say what we say. If we are skilled, safe, thorough, conscientious pilots, there is more the likelihood they will turn out the same. If we take chances, skid by the regulations, lack confidence, knowledge, or skill, are fearful or unprepared, cavalier, even arrogant . . . well, point taken.

One student early in his training took special notice of my older-style, since-discontinued model David-Clark H10-80 headset, with separate volume controls for each side. After I upgraded the set years ago with modern Gel-seals, those soft, luxurious, thicker ones, the headset is now perfect.

I love this headset. I eat wearing it, sleep, drive, shower wearing it, shave, shop, work on my classic Chevy pickup truck wearing it, and remarkably, I even have been known to wear it in the cockpit. I even wear it talking to my wife. She knows better than to try to communicate with me without plugging in. I never leave home without it.

So, my student searched eBay and elsewhere every evening, and in his spare time at work, too, as an emergency room physician, for two weeks, no less, to try to find the same model. He ended up buying a different model David-Clark. His still is a superb headset, but I could tell he was more than a little disappointed he could not find the same model as mine. Like father; like son. Like instructor; like student. This is where we learn it.