Customizing Flight Review Can Make a Huge Difference

I spent the past weekend at the Northwest Aviation Conference & Trade Show, which is held annually on the third weekend in February at the Washington State Fair Event Center in Puyallup.

The conference is part trade show, part “family reunion,” and part educational smorgasbord. It’s the latter that I enjoy the most. Traditionally, the event has more than 70 hours of seminars covering everything from getting the most out of your aircraft’s avionics or engine, renewal seminars for A&Ps, planning your career, mountain flying, instrument proficiency, and the big kahuna, getting the rust off your pilot certificate.

I’m a big believer in continuing education for pilots. I make it a point to review lessons from online ground schools and do online FAASTeam seminars a few times a month. I recommend this practice to my clients, as continual learning is usually more beneficial than slam studying the week before your flight review or check ride.

This year I found a kindred spirit in seminar presenter Steve Bateman, a CFI who runs Chocks Away Aviation in Prineville, Oregon. Bateman shared an engaging seminar at the NWAC on getting the most out of your flight review. The reason I enjoyed his presentation is because it included tips for instructors who administer the flight review, and I am always looking for new and different ways to teach, because flight instruction is always about best practices for communicating with the client.

Bateman is based at Prineville Airport (S39) in central Oregon and is also the president of the Oregon Pilots Association and a Rusty Pilots seminar presenter for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). He specializes in transition training, tailwheel flying, and flight reviews.

The flight review, according to Bateman, is one of the most important tools we CFIs have in our kit to make aviation safer. He said it works best when the client and the CFI discuss what will be done in advance and then craft a plan. 

Bateman’s presentation was a multipronged approach, as it addressed the role of both the pilot getting the review and the instructor administering it. For best results there should be pre-first-meeting communication between the instructor and client, which includes a discussion of what would be most appropriate for the pilot.

Some examples: If you haven’t done a short or soft field takeoff and landing since earning your pilot certificate, make these part of your review. If you’ve been flying elaborate evasive routing to avoid transitioning tower-controlled airspace out of trepidation, make sure the flight review involves heading to the closest towered airport to get some experience.

Scenarios can be used to practice emergency procedures, like the steep spiral. The scenario is that you have to get down quickly and in a contained space because the VFR is rapidly dropping to MVFR and on the way to IMC, but you happen to be over an airport, and you aren’t IFR rated. Know the best practices for your aircraft and how to maintain coordination.

Bateman cautions pilots not to get too heavily dependent on technology to perform basic tasks required for the preflight such as determining aircraft weight and balance, performance and once in the air, navigation. The old “if you don’t use it, you lose it” caveat applies here.

He recommends sitting down with a performance chart once in a while, noting the temperature, field elevation and winds, and crunching the performance numbers. Do some flights by pilotage and dead reckoning, and use a paper sectional and mechanical E6-B flight computer to create the navlog just to keep those skills from fading.

To illustrate this point, Bateman included an image of Spock from the original Star Trek using a mechanical E6-B on the screen to make scientific calculations. This was greeted with a murmur of approval from the audience who know the connection between the classic TV show and aviation. And, full disclosure, as a fan and teacher of the mechanical E6-B in addition to using electronic apps and a big Star Trek fan, I was compelled to hold my virtual lighter up in salute.

One of the salient points Bateman mentioned in regard to the use of technology is that if the pilot relies on it too much and it fails or they don’t know how to properly use it, it can result in a panic condition known as “gallina decapitata,” or “chicken with its head cut off” syndrome.

The other reaction to being overloaded when the tech fails is freezing, like a rodent that gets its head stuck in an empty opaque container. Neither is a good thing for a pilot.

Pick Your CFI Carefully

To get the most out of a flight review, there needs to be a good match between the CFI and  client. This can be a challenge if the flight school uses a rotating list of instructors to do the flight reviews, or it falls to whoever has an opening on their schedule. Some clients are very particular. 

One man didn’t want to fly with a woman CFI. Another didn’t want to fly with a CFI who was young enough to be his son. Sometimes the clients come in and ask for an instructor with specific experience, such as G1000 time, tailwheel, Cirrus, or a high-performance endorsement.

CFIs can also be selective, notes Bateman, who is big on screening for the five hazardous attitudes—macho, invulnerability, anti-authority, impulsivity, and resignation because all those can get in the way of instruction.

Instructors should also be careful if the client has an attitude of entitlement and expects to be endorsed automatically, no matter if they fly to the level of their certificate or not. Other no-gos are the clients who want to get the flight review done on the cheap and declare they will only pay for one hour of ground and one hour of flight and they expect to get the endorsement—no matter how they perform.

We all know flying is expensive, but when it comes to a safety metric like the flight review please don’t try to cut corners. Safety is not something you should skimp on.