A lot of folks have been saying that the training system is broken. It is and it has been for several years. The advent of technically advanced aircraft has just made that breakdown more apparent. Now, with the coming of the very light jets (VLJ) there is much hand-wringing about "amateurs" in the flight levels. (Let's clear one thing up right at the beginning here: Amateur is an attitude, not a paycheck. I've met some student pilots who were among the most professional pilots I've known, and I've also flown with some 5,000-hour ATP amateurs.)The way we have trained pilots in the past just won't work any longer. The system is broken and the sooner it is fixed, the sooner we can improve the accident statistics. Fully 85% of the general aviation accidents are attributable -- at least in part -- to pilot error, and yet avoidance of these errors and enhanced judgment is the one subject we don't adequately teach. There are test-prep courses that teach students how to pass a multiple-choice test. That's working so well that students have been known to finish the Private Pilot Knowledge Test in five minutes or less.(And, as a consequence, the FAA no longer releases the total test bank. Their attitude, and I agree with them, is that one question of each type will be released. If you know how to flight plan, you should be able to answer any flight planning question, even if you haven't seen that exact question before. Some companies are still trying to use tricky wording in advertising to make you believe that they have all the questions, but they don't. Nobody but the FAA does, and they aren't talking!)We take students to the practice area and drill them at length until they are able to do perfect turns around a point, s-turns along a road and lazy-eights. When was the last time a pilot was killed because the lazy eight was less than perfect?
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/from-the-cfi-2-a-new-way-to-train