Using 20/20 hindsight, what additional knowledge or skills would have been nice to know prior to completing your Private Pilot check ride?
Ooooh, I have a whole list of these going. Started it years ago "for when I got my CFI" which I still haven't done.
* How to fuel the plane at a self serve pump. Running out of gas is still FAR too common, and I think if pilots were comfortable with how to fuel their own plane at any podunk little airport they came to this would be far less common.
* How to fly with non-pilot passengers: Giving a good briefing, making them comfortable and giving them some control (I always say "The whole point of this is for you to have fun. If at any point you stop having fun, let me know and we'll land."), flying smoothly, explaining things at the right level for them, etc.
* Related to the above: How to fly with kids
* Taking good care of your/club/rental airplanes: Leave the rotating beacon switched on, how to properly tie down, when to use engine heaters, tons of different stuff here.
* Regulations - I'll cover more on that below
* Good habits for flying bigger/faster planes: Descent and arrival planning, checklists, engine management, etc. You can get away without good habits in a trainer, but most pilots want to fly higher/farther/faster later on so this can be motivation for developing the good habits even in the trainer.
* Courteous (to both other pilots and general public) flying: Minimizing noise, staying aware of prop blast, don't hog the courtesy car for a whole weekend or leave it with an empty tank, etc
* The dipstick trick for when you're trying to fill oil on a windy ramp and you don't have a funnel
* Expanding your skill set safely (only push one corner of the envelope at a time!) and when to seek additional instruction (acro, mountain, backcountry, etc)
* Anticipating difficult decisions and setting parameters in advance to remove external and internal pressures. For example, flying a flight with pax at the limits of range with a forecast for increasing headwinds, I set parameters the day before for "if at point A I'm below X gallons, I'm landing at airport 1 for fuel; if at point B I'm below Y gallons, I'm landing at airport 2 for fuel. Only if I have at least Z gallons at point B will I consider continuing to the destination."
* How to make plan A, B, and C in advance and then throw them all away in the air when necessary.
* How to travel safely for business and pleasure with GA: Leaving early and/or having a backup plan when schedules aren't flexible, how to plan a long trip including stops for fuel/food/RON etc, the 1000/100/10 rule for flying around weather,
* Best practices for autopilot usage
Plenty more possibilities. None of these need to be big, time-consuming things, but a short discussion is worthwhile and can also be done in a group setting.
A better understanding of how to look this up in the FARs, AIM, and other FAA documents instead of just sticking with what your CFI told you or "how we do it at our airport".
That's a good one! A few main concepts on the FARs would go a LONG way:
* Where to find things in the FARs: If it matters who's flying it's 61, if it doesn't matter who's flying it's 91.
* How to find out whether a reg applies to you (Applicability)
* Where to look for "or" and "and", and the difference between "shall" and "may"
* Finding definitions
* Searching chief counsel interpretations
* Things that will be found in 49 CFR instead of 14 CFR
If I were a CFI I'd probably ask the students to also look up 5 actual fatal VFR into IMC cases, read the NTSBs, dig up the historical relevant METARs/TAFs and explain what likely went wrong.
Kind of like what we do in our Aviation Mishap board. All in an attempt to try and make things a little more concrete about the cost of being over confident or ignorant.
Something like that to drive home the idea that it's not just things that happen to other people.
To study accident reports, including generating concise & correct takeaways from each.
The big thing here is to get the point across that "pilot error" is not a root cause, and pilots aren't idiots, so WHY did that pilot make the error? Visualize yourself in that particular scenario, and maybe visualize some of the external pressures that might have been present that caused a smart pilot to make a stupid mistake.
Also, normalization of deviance and how "experience" isn't always the best guide for what's OK to do.
I also think if you don’t get real IMC during your PPL, you’re getting short-changed.
I'd say this is more applicable to instrument, though it can be very eye-opening. I've thought about this a bunch, and though I did get almost 3 hours of actual IMC during my private training, some types of people will look at the fact that they didn't lose control and think that they don't need to get an instrument rating. Depends on the student, of course.
