Pilot preflight inspection12/2/2023 ![]() The commentator pointed out that Al had wanted to know all that he could about the airplane on the preflight and therefore there really wasn’t anything that a pilot should not consider important when learning about an airplane. After his column appeared, one of his readers commented negatively on it by referring to the column I had written about the legendary test pilot, Al White, and the very long preflight I had done with Al on a Cessna 402 some years ago. He allowed as how a fair proportion of it was meaningless rote memorization of trivia that every pilot from the Montgolfiers on has promptly dumped from his or her brain once a checkride was complete because it would never be used in actual operations. After all, each person who walks in the door expressing the desire to fly is much braver than the average member of our society because he or she has spent a lifetime being inundated by our media happily extolling the dangers of little airplanes.While Sandy was talking with the CFI, I got to thinking about her philosophy of a preflight versus that of the negative CFI, and I was reminded of Michael Maya Charles’ recent column about all of the stuff he had to learn while going through MD-11 school. ![]() She reminded him gently that new students are fully aware that they can kill themselves in airplanes. The student was starting to get pale as the instructor got into wings folding and propellers flinging blades, so much so that I began to wonder whether this instructor would manage to chase off yet another student pilot and then have the chance to complain about how there just aren’t any people who really want to learn to fly.A bit later, I heard Sandy - one of our resident airline pilots and a Citabria owner - pull the instructor aside and suggest to him that he approach the preflight from a more positive standpoint, that of making sure things are working, rather than from his very negative point of view. The instructor was going on and on about the importance of the preflight inspection as well as all of the possible horribles that could occur to the hapless student if he failed to check everything on the airplane. I was in the pilot’s lounge, here at the virtual airport, doing my shallow breathing exercises, when I found myself eavesdropping on some training one of the instructors was giving to a primary student.
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