A student again

After seven months of not working on a rating I'm back in student mode again.

Of course, as long as you fly you're really just a student pilot because you're always learning. It holds true if you have 200 hours or 20,000. Well, at least it should because the moment you think you're beyond learning new things as a pilot it's time to find a new line of work before you kill yourself or somebody else.

Anyhow, the challenge this time around is getting through the Cirrus Standardized Instructor Program. It's a deal up at the Cirrus factory in Duluth designed to teach instructors how to teach the Cirrus in the same manner the factory folks use.

The first step was getting the required minimum 250 hours of dual given. Then came applying, setting up a training date and ordering a 15-pound box of training manuals to study before I actually show up for training.

My $417 box of books arrived yesterday and I dove right in. It's a daunting prospect.

Actually flying the airplane, and teaching the basics of flying the airplane, is the easy part because, well, it's an easy airplane to fly.

Teaching the systems, well, that's going to be another story.

I've flown a few glass-cockpit Cirri before but not a whole lot. I find the Avidyne system itself fairly intuitive and simple to use but the devil is always in the details and there are a ton of details that I need to get down in the next three weeks so I can teach the thing.

The irony is that I'll be taking our SR-20 up for training. It's a first-generation model, with steam gauges, an S-tec 30 autopilot and an old-style Multi-Function Display that looks sort of like an Atari. I'm betting there's nobody up there conducting training who actually knows much about that airplane.

For starters there's not much to know. And, the emphasis is on getting the most out of the Garmin 430 (which our SR-20 has) and the Avidyine PFD/MFD coupled to the S-tec 55x autopilot (neither of which graces N2014Y.) The only datalink weather on our SR-20 are my eyeballs and Flight Watch. Traffic alerting is again the calibrated Mark One Eyeball, sometimes coupled with an alert air traffic controller. Hell, the thing has a single-probe EGT for leaning.

The Garmin 430 is really the heart of getting somewhere in a Cirrus and, thankfully, I'm pretty comfortable with that wonderful box. Oddly, I have no benchmark against which I can actually rate my knowledge. Expert? Beginner? Who knows. I know more about the box than most, not as much as many and I guess I'll just leave it at that.

One thing that I really like about the program is that the emphasis is on scenario-based training.

Instead of going out to the airplane and flying a bunch of approaches, for example, the training program utilizes cross-country flights so the student gets a full 'real-world' experience flying the airplane the way it'll actually be flown.

A constant frustration of mine is that FAA check rides really just test maneuvers, so that's the focus of the bulk of the training. I'd like to do things differently, but I also know I need to get my students through the check ride so we spend more time than I'd like working on maneuvers instead of focusing on 'real-world' experience.

The other barrier (perhaps more perceived on my part than a true barrier) is simply the cost. It's an efficient use of my student's time and money to head out and fly four approaches in an hour at a few nearby airports. That gets them plenty of practice flying approaches but doesn't emulate the real-world particularly well.

Since the instrument check ride is pretty much all about flying approaches well that approach makes sense.

With my instrument students I've been making certain that we do several IFR cross-country trips, not just the single IFR trip that is required by the regulations. The thinking being that they'll learn more about real-world IFR operations if they've done it more than once.

I do make every effort to incorporate scenario-based training on every flight, with both my primary and instrument students, but I'm still learning how best to do that. I'll continue to do more and more scenario-based training because I think it's so valuable and people learn better that way. Hopefully the CSIP experience will help with that.