Becoming a French Pilot - blog

As for learning with stopwatch / map / navlog, it’s simply because some aircrafts don’t have anything else, some pilots like it that way, and most VFR aircrafts navigation equipment is not redundant enough to be reliable (let alone iPads etc.). The exam simply makes sure you’re able to use what you MUST legally carry to not get lost too easily. It really makes sense IMO that FIs teach you this and the PPL exam checks for it. It doesn’t mean you have to use it always to navigate.

Back to the article, and aside from the sideslip debate, the “encadrement” technique is quite interesting to me, for several reasons:

• It forces you to define how you’re going to land (visualize a runway and a direction instead of just going to some field)
• It uses simple, objective visual cues that are pretty much independent of terrain (no illusion of being too high / too low because you don’t know the area). As it’s been said though they do depend on your plane (especially if the wing is used as a reference).
• It makes a simple reflex procedure out of a forced landing, which greatly helps streamlining the process and potentially avoids the stress of having to choose what to do. Once you’ve chosen your field, you just the procedure and (hopefully) you’re good.
• Finally, it keeps you permanently in a position with some flexibility to manoeuver either way (a sideslip can make you lose altitude but can’t get it back). When you’re doing the circling around, you can extend slightly your approach if you’re too high, or shorten it if you’re too low. Potentially it avoids bad estimations that make you land too short or too long and hit a fence at the end.

But it’s definitely NOT made for engine failure after takeoff. You need to be about 1000ft directly above your landing spot in order to execute it properly. It’s made for engine failure in cruise instead, where you have one minute or more to plan your landing, approach the spot and circle around.

“I’m told that a typical French PPL flies about 20 hours/year.”
I think you.would need to add “club” and “certified aircraft” to this ie the typical French Club PPL flies around 20hrs/year.
Looking at SMILE and FFA reports I would estimate it more at 13hrs/year.
However, you average certified owner, your average annexe 1 owner and your average ULM pilot is usually doing a lot many more hours.
If you read RSA and FFPLUM reports it looks more like 30 to 40 hours a year.
Italy and Croatia have become favourite destinations for the French ULM scene as can be seen on You Tube.
I’ve been particularly interested in a series of videos of Super Guépard trip out of Fréjus and touring through the Italian Alps and down to Venice
This year our club ULM hours is going to well outstrip the number of hours flown in the club certified aircraft for the first time.
The times they are a changing🙂

avoidance of restricted airspace.

Again, we have another crucial country-specific element.

In the UK, data here, my description (much hated by CAA/NATS) here, they let off PPL students who busted but after you get your PPL you must not bust any CAS / DA / RA / ATZ because all these – they are ranked equally for persecution purposes – will land you into the “offender processing pipeline”, and often not into the start of it… ATC have software picking up busts with a high degree of reliability, plus an ATCO failing to file an MOR repeatedly will eventually be fired. ATC have no discretion now; it’s all changed from ~ 5 years ago.

In France, you call up some controller, doesn’t matter much which one because they are all connected up, all are radar-qualified and radar-equipped, even INFO, and you say “routing A-B-C-D” and he says, cool as a cucumber, “radar contact”. No “cleared to” etc. You just fly. They don’t look after mil airspace or the ZITs etc; you still need to avoid those yourself, although they may warn you. For the purposes of not flying where you think you are flying and getting away with it, France is a world away from the UK, and almost a world away from anywhere else in N Europe.

Throw in the aeroclub mission profile (short flights and generally at low levels) and the pressure to teach GPS is very low.

I’m told that a typical French PPL flies about 20 hours/year.

I am told by French pilots that the standard deviation is rather big

In the UK there is a lot of 20-30hr pilots (the average is often claimed to be that) but I strongly suspect there are very few 5-10hr pilots, because to fly at that level you need a very accessible ecosystem, which France has.

But the amount of justification for obviously ludicrously stupid things is still astonishing.

I recommend reading e.g. here which was started by one “extremely famous” German and where there is other input from Germany.

In short, the principal challenge (“problem”) is that if you are to have GPS within PPL training then you need to mandate the installation of GPS in every school plane, and there needs to be some level of standardisation to enable the drafting of a common syllabus. And this is fiercely resisted by all the usual under-the-table interests, starting with flying schools whose business model is to take say 15k from everybody and is not the production of pilots capable of flying from A to B.

The FAA has handled it quite cleverly, by requiring the demonstration of competence of all equipment installed, at each checkride. So if a school has chosen to buy a plane with a G1000 (e.g. to “look modern” to today’s Ipad-everywhere clientele) the students have to learn the G1000 to pass their PPL checkrides. Obviously not to the extent of loading approach plates; that is outside the PPL. So a school has to make this business decision. I suggested this to the head of UK CAA Licensing, face to face at some meeting, pointing out that if the CAA did this, they would not get blamed by the school lobby, and he thought it was quite clever too… then he retired.

The OP’s experience in this context is from France whose PPL activity is dominated by a specific sort of aeroclub culture with a pretty specific mission profile (basically, down the road for a lunch on a nice day, four-up in a Robin, very social, and almost never leaving France). Of course nobody non-French is allowed to say this

In Germany, like the UK, people get out a bit more (all sorts of reasons, with ELP being pretty high on the list as is totally massively evident to anybody watching European touring patterns) and GPS adoption is thus a lot higher, at least among those ~10% who don’t chuck it in right away. But it is still mostly not taught as the primary nav method. Instead, many valuable hours are wasted on the WW1 dead reckoning crap. Can “we” change this? I doubt it, but this is not through a lack of talking about it

@Thomas you are not reading or understanding what has been written.
Regarding “S” curves as I wrote here student pilots are encouraged to " go round" if one is not on a stabilised approach and although I don’t particularly like “S” curves and would prefer a forward side slip to lose altitude if need be the the reports I have seen from FFA/DSAC/BEA testing and research shows that a stabilised “S” is a safer way to lose altitude on final if you cannot “go around”. It is not my research or testing it is something done by professionals and then advice sent out to clubs and instructors in France. It is up to the clubs and instructors what they do with that advice. Most seem to have decided on the “go around” as first choice following an unstable approach 2nd favoured option if the “go around” is not possible is the “S”. No one is saying that Germany should follow suit. No one is forcing pilot owners to do ditch the side slip. No one is saying that flapless aircraft should do “S” instead of slips, although I do know a school that does prefer the “S” method to slips on flapless Jodels and even an Avid Flyer which can land and stop on the numbers.
So no one is saying you should not do what you do every day. All they are saying is don’t do it an a club aircraft. Their insurance their choice.
Instructors have always had their own idiosyncracies. Since I have been flying in this area I have met many instructors. Some have gone from PPL to instructor training school, some are ex or current airline pilots, one was an ex fast jet jockey who was also a member of the Patrouille de France (French version of the Red Arrows) , one had been a world aerobatic champion and one spent his military service landing on aircraft carriers. Do you really think that they didn’t all have their own little idiosyncracies?
And so we come to the old GPS saga as you call it. Pilots have and always will be trained on the aircraft and equipment that is available at the time. One thing hasn’t changed navigation by maps, watch and compass.
Personally I learnt that way but now much prefer the Ipad or other tablet running Skydemon or SDVFR. I was surprised to see in johnh’s blog that he wasn’t able to use the same. AFAIK there is no regulation that you cannot use one even in the flight test.
But you mentioned GNSS not GPS. It might therefore surprise you to know that very few French aéroclubs actually have GNSS equipped aircraft you would be lucky to get a panel mounted GPS at all and if you did it would be unlikely to have a current database.
Again you might be surprised to find that there are quite a few pilots out there who actually enjoy navigating by map watch and compass ( although some may also use a DI (horror of horrors). These same pilots enjoy the challenge of calculating wind vectors in their head and when all their mental gymnastics puts them over exactly where they wanted to be they feel a great sense of achievement. For many flying is not only about how to use some sort of electronic gizmos to get from A to B. But you seem to think that such people should just give it up and fly your way or not at all.
Finally might I remind you that whilst professional pilots are taught to fly stabilised approaches and their SOPs say that if the aircraft isn’t stable “go missed”, side slips are not stable approaches and student PPLs are not yet at least professional pilots and not all want to be.

Yeah, I know that not everybody supports the status quo described here. But the amount of justification for obviously ludicrously stupid things is still astonishing.

this thread contains the most condensed amount of aviation bullshit

You may be shooting the messenger

It’s hard to change PPL training…