Review of Radio, Navigation and Ops training

But no school I have ever heard of does it.

Sounds like a business opportunity: £150 on how to incorporate your iPad mini nav software into your flying?
1. Fly
2. Look at where you are in nav software
3. Fly
4. Look at where you are in nav software

UK’s. problem is that very few of newly trained pilots enter the longer term flying community.

There is over-reliance as well as under-reliance of the GPS. The AAIB concluded that an accident in the UK couple of years ago would probably not have happened if the pilot, who was lost, had turned the on-board GPS on and looked at the moving map.
When I did a final check for the PPL test last year, the student pilot asked if he could use the GPS. (Already indicates a problem – the training does not make the status of the GPS clear during training.) Then he spent so much time and attention fiddling the GPS that he was not able to fly acceptably, let alone keep a good lookout. Had he set it up before departure, he would have had a nice navigation backup without further action, and I could have turned it off at any time to check if he could navigate the old way, too.
Not teaching use of the GPS during training is leaving it to the new inexperienced pilots to find out for themselves how to use it efficiently and safely, because 90% will use GPS as their prime means of navigation once they are PIC. One day they will discover whether they are always ready to revert to other means of navigation when the GPS acts up. But the schools are pressured to only cover what is compulsory, and although GPS has found its way into the new Theory Syllabus, it is still not required flight training.

FWIW, the UK PPL syllabus does not ban (and therefore allows) GPS for everything except for a couple of very specific exercises.

There is an instructor here who has pointed that out (elsewhere).

But no school I have ever heard of does it. Maybe he does it.

“passed so long as the instructor survives the flight. Broken legs are OK because he can sign the pilot off using just one hand This needs to be modified, with specific things which must be passed otherwise there is no signature”
I believe it is on its way. It appears that the GA people in EASA is working on what should be covered. Whether it will improve things remains to be seen.
For the Night Rating, it has just happened. Used to be only hours requirement; now there is a theory syllabus and specific points to be covered in flight training. A proposal so far; not yet in force.

In that situation if every plane were talking to ATC they would quickly become overwhelmed and ineffectual even with proper radar coverage.

A good point; common sense should apply, something which went out the window for me last year when I asked Farnborough for a Basic Service, knowing that I would be on frequency probably no more than 5 minutes. It was very busy, I was going through an area I knew well and just tied up the frequency twice (signing on and off) for no benefit to anyone whatsoever. Even as I pushed the button, a little voice was yelling “don’t be such a berk” but off I went as per my training.

Pilots should be able to fly “on their own” OCAS and not with a “helping hand” from ATC.

But there is common sense and common sense. In the above example, common sense had a go at me for blindly following my training. On the other hand, I was recently on a familiarisation flight in a different a/c which happened to be in my old training area. I was not PIC although I had control. We were not on any frequency which made me a little uncomfortable as I knew my old school might be out practicing stalls and PFL’s around there. Normally, the school’s a/c would announce if they were doing PFL’s or general handling. It would have seemed prudent to me to at least be listening out to help us keep an eye open if there was anyone. I did not want to argue with the PIC in the air although if I was seeing lots of other aircraft around, I probably would have insisted a bit more.

Personally, I think the biggest change would come from encouraging (as part of training) the use of portable GPSs with proper maps and airspace warning.

It seems that that is not possible in the UK due to the current regulations. I was fortunate in that my instructor was very good at telling me not to waste money buying loads of aviation equipment and gadgets (he probably saved me a couple of hundred pounds during my training!) except to tell me to buy SkyDemon or something like that as soon as I completed my training. He used to use SkyDemon to show me (how far I deviated from) my planned track during navex’s. I agree that you need to get used to it and build it into the scan flow though to stay ahead.

Make good use of the resources available, would be my suggestion. Whilst I have found certain radar equipped units to be downright awkward, I must say that London Info have been unfailingly helpful even with some, er… obscure requests.

Education is going to be the only way, and the only opportunity for that with the existing pilot community is the 2-yearly class rating reval flight.

Education is important in understanding what’s required, but I think once that’s established in PPL training, recency and experience are more important. Flying is a multitasking activity that responds well to frequent practice. Anything that increases costs and complexity will increase airspace incursions, through lack of practice. More regulatory crap and infrequent hand holding won’t help.

Continual contact with ATC for airspace management is going completely in the wrong direction to me, especially where traffic is dense. In that situation if every plane were talking to ATC they would quickly become overwhelmed and ineffectual even with proper radar coverage. GPS is a HUGE help, whether installed or portable, but it depends on the pilot being able to fly the plane and look at the GPS simultaneously, without error. That takes recency and experience above all else.

I don’t think there is anywhere in Europe or the USA where you can fly without being pretty sure of your position.

Talking to ATC has massively variable benefits according to where you are.

In say France, you can do a flight like this and rely on ATC (which is 100% radar equipped down there) to clear you through, and tell you to avoid some active area.

In the UK, that will not work at all. For example I once flew from Shoreham to Wellesbourne (basically a northern track out of Shoreham, 2400ft as usual, and avoiding the London TMA). Very unusually for me (probably the one time in a year) I had not checked the notams, and there was some royal flight. The lady ATCO at Farnborough asked me if I knew about the notam and apologetically I said No and asked if they can route me around that. She absolutely refused to help and just sent me on a track of 270 for about 30 miles (basically telling me that she was going to teach me a lesson for being a bad boy) and then pretended to be too busy to pick me up again. Eventually I got back on track, about half an hour later and after a massive dogleg. That sort of unprofessional behaviour is very unusual but I fly own there very often and the few radar units the UK has which take on GA radio are not in the business of offering any kind of enroute navigation service. London Control do that but only on a Eurocontrol IFR flight plan, and you have to be high enough to be in CAS the whole time. The extent of what say Farnborough Radar will do is pick up the CAS bust, hopefully while you are talking to them, tell you to immediately turn left/right/descend and then you are back on your own. That is what say Farnborough gets some millions a year LARS funding for – it reduces CAS busts so a business case can be made for it. No business case = no funding for the service. So in the UK you are practically on your own and the benefit of using the radio is just a second level of protection against a screw-up, but you aren’t likely to get a continued assistance once the bust has been resolved.

On EuroGA we are mostly “modern pilots” so we don’t get the old UK “GPS is bad, use your Mk1 eyeball, my son, we beat the Germans twice with that so it is good enough for you” debates which still pop up elsewhere, but

• GPS is still not being taught in the PPL (and the industry would resist any mandatory usage because it means buying some kit)
• it will be many years before the training fleet is updated with modern stuff (with panel mounted GPS) via gradual modernisation
• a lot of people have gone it alone and fly with e.g. Skydemon (and it’s obvious from those I have flown with that most don’t understand how to configure the user interface which has many “IT-geek” options)
• a lot of pilots who have been flying for decades navigate visually, which works most of the time if you do simple routes

I do not believe the UK VFR charts are difficult. The grass is always greener… Except around the famous Belfast bit they are 100% non-ambiguous (unlike say the Jepps or the above-linked French one) in terms of which airspace is where. The shapes of say the London TMA are determined by the various sids/stars and missed approach tracks and they aren’t going to be changed anytime soon (Gatwick is not likely to say “hey guys we all know everything is or can be radar vectored so let’s scrap the 53 pages (just counted them) of sids/stars which are never used”) and anyway making the LTMA smaller would just make the busts take place nearer the airport(s) i.e. much more dangerous.

Education is going to be the only way, and the only opportunity for that with the existing pilot community is the 2-yearly class rating reval flight.