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The Basic Stage

The goal of the basic flight lessons is to teach students how to guide the aircraft and feel relaxed and confident enough so that they can move on to more advanced control of the aircraft. Students are introduced to flight planning and judgement skills. To accomplish this effectively the instructor must be quite explicit as to where the students should look and how they should apply the basic technique. They must get the most ‘correct’ experience about how we fly the plane. It is often necessary at this stage to leave out a great deal about how the airplane works. Airflow over the surfaces is often less important than the experience that if we move the stick to the right, the right wing goes down as evidenced by our view of the world tilting relative to the horizon. At the end of this stage the student should be able to:
  1. Understand and use the flight controls related to the ailerons, elevator, and rudder.
  2. Perform lookout and flight monitoring skills necessary to perform basic turns.
  3. Execute well co-ordinated turns at bank angles up to 30 degrees in both normal and slow flight regimes and be able to link turns.
  4. Maintain level flight (non-turning flight).
  5. Understand the symptoms of slow flight, and be able to initiate and recover from gentle stalls started from a level-flight attitude.
  6. Demonstrate the secondary effects of the rudder.
  7. Understand the nature of the sub-gravity sensations, be reasonably comfortable with them, and be able to recover to normal flight effectively.
  8. Execute basic thermalling techniques.
  9. Understand how to control the glidepath using an aiming point.
If there is any one part of the flight-training curriculum that lends itself to more standardized lesson plans it is this stage. If we limit our goals to these skills, ones that are all essentially closed in nature, occurring in-flight, with reference largely to the horizon. The only challenges at this stage would be related to poor visibility or turbulence. Of course there is a certain amount of non-control knowledge at this stage as well. By the end of this stage the student should have a good grasp of:
  1. Basic terminology.
  2. Basic aerodynamic concepts, including the theory and symptoms of the stall.
  3. Aircraft ground handling, movement, and securing.
  4. Pre-flight aircraft inspections.
  5. Basic flight-line operations.
  6. Minimum administrative requirements (permits, logging etc.)