Questions from the Cockpit: Slow to the Party

Kimberly, the spouse of a pilot-in-training in Arizona, asks: With all the changes in aviation over the last few decades, how has the current training of pilots changed, compared to previous generations?

As it so happens, I’ve recently learned quite a bit about this. At my “day job” I’ve been working on an instructional standardization project that, among other things, involved what academicians call a “literature review” for perspective on how flight training has been delivered — and how it’s changed — over its 12-decade-long history.

A literature review, while it sounds highfalutin, is basically just reading everything you can get your paws on that deals with whatever subject you are researching. Thank you, hoarders of old. Thanks to eBay, I’ve now got a pretty good grasp on the very early flight “training” of the 1900s through the 1920s, the state of the art in the late 1930s and early 1940s, how that changed with the ramp up to intensive training during World War II, and a number of interesting changes in philosophy in the post-war decades through GA’s heyday and right up to today’s mass-production training of future airline pilots.

And while, as one would expect, a lot of things have changed — especially delivery methods — over that span of time, it’s what hasn’t changed that really struck me.

And what hasn’t changed in nearly 100 years — with a few exceptions that we’ll talk about in a minute — is what we teach. The maneuvers, the flight ops, and exercises used to forge pilots are pretty much unchanged since the dawn of flight: The four fundamentals — straight and level, turns, climbs, and descents — that are the base-code DNA of all flight maneuvers, stalls, ground reference maneuvers, steep turns, spirals, and the various flavors of takeoffs and landings.

The few exceptions I mentioned? We’ve dropped a couple of maneuvers over the years. The most notable abandoned maneuver is the spin, which used to be a staple of flight training at the primary level (in some old training syllabi, it was on Day 1!), and is now only formally taught at the CFI level. The forerunner of the FAA dropped spins as a training requirement for private pilots back in 1949.

Also gone from primary flight training are some of the more envelope-stretching maneuvers like rolls and loops and even the tamer wing-over. But for the most part, all the maneuvers of yore still appear in today’s Airplane Flying Handbook, including a number of traditional maneuvers that are rarely taught nowadays for the simple reason — I suspect — that they aren’t on the current test.

A particularly noteworthy example of this is that most flight schools do not teach three-fifths of the ground reference maneuvers in the family of “eights.” Most modern students aren’t introduced to the venerable eights-along-a-road, eights-across-a-road, and eights-around-pylons (not to be confused with the commercial maneuver eights-on-pylons).

But other than that, the modern maneuver training syllabus looks pretty much like our grandfather’s. But surely, you say, with all the changes in aviation, there must be new things that have been added in 120 years?

Not as much as you’d think, at least when it comes to the hands-on part of flying.

What my generation still calls hood-work (and what younger pilots think of as foggle-work), is newer than many other flight maneuvers simply because aircraft instrumentation is, well, newer, than airplanes. But don’t think this is modern. World War II aviation cadets spent plenty of time “under the hood” in the early 1940s.

As near as I can tell, the newest addition to the portfolio of aviation training maneuvers is — ironically, given its name — slow flight. Yes, slow flight was late to the party. As a formally taught (and tested) maneuver, it did not appear on the scene until the mid 1950s under its original name “maneuvering at minimum controllable airspeed.”

This is the slow flight I learned in the early 1980s, wallowing through the skies, the stall horn blaring, praying I wouldn’t get too fast so the horn silenced or get too slow and stall, either of which would cause you to fail. Since 2016, student pilots do slow… well, leisurely… flight, at speeds well faster than the stall horn.

Of course, in the “olden days” prior to the 1950s, slow flight was assuredly “taught.” One must go slow to land, after all. One also must go slow to stall and stall training goes waaaaaay back. But actually treating slow flight as a maneuver, something specifically incorporated into training — to be demonstrated, practiced, and tested as a task of its own — appears to be the newest member of the family.

And in keeping with our theme, I was intrigued to see that it was adopted rather slowly.

Initially, slow flight — as something independently identifiable in flight training — was wrapped into the four fundamentals in the pilot training regulations of the 1950s, the Civil Air Regulations, called the CARs back then. Under the aeronautical skill section of the private pilot regs, we find that pilot applicants must satisfactorily accomplish “straight and level flight, left and right medium banked turns, left and right climbing and gliding turns at normal and minimum controllable speeds.” This language doesn’t appear in older versions of the CARs.

Next, minimum controllable airspeed is set aside as a separate skill to be tested in the early 1960s Flight Test Guides, the ancient ancestor of today’s Airman Certification Standards or ACS. But it’s not specifically discussed in pilot training materials until 1965’s Flight Training Handbook.

Slow progress indeed.

The only real change in flight training content is outside of flying skills, with a greater emphasis on systems, which have become more complex, risk management and decision-making and, of course, the buttonology that comes with the modern computerized glass cockpit and its associated navigation systems (but we still teach the old methods of navigation by landmark and compass).

But training people how to actually fly? That hasn’t really changed at all.