AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2020 - 22

FLYING LIFE

'Technedure'

BY NATALIE BINGHAM HOOVER

Questioning what we think we know

NATALIE BINGHAM
HOOVER is a CFI,
CFII, and MEI with
thousands of hours
of dual given.

22 | AOPA PILOT March 2020

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was taking a checkride with an
FAA inspector to renew my assistant chief position at
a Part 141 flight school. When asked to teach the steep
turn maneuver, I rolled through 30 degrees of bank,
adding a touch of power and two turns of nose-up trim
on my way to the required 45-degree bank angle.
"Do I have to add the power and trim?" he asked.
I explained that, yes, those things were required
in order to prevent a loss of altitude from the steep
bank angle.
He just smiled and proceeded to execute a perfect
steep turn without adjusting the power or the trim. His
way required a little more power and forward pressure
on the front end, but the result was the same: constant altitude and airspeed during a 360-degree, steep
banked turn. "It's called 'technedure,'" he explained.
"That's where a personal technique becomes an official procedure. Watch out for that." Because I had only
ever trained on steep turns with one flight instructor, I
believed that our way was the way.
The inspector's comments had me questioning not
just steep turns, but every other thing about the way I
flew. How many of the things we do in aircraft are based
on actual, flight-tested data and how much is personal
technique reinforced so often that it's become procedure? Because our pilot minds are packed full of aviation
knowledge, sometimes we're not exactly sure where
that knowledge came from. We hope it was a factual,
trusted text. But it could have been the opinion of an
inexperienced flight instructor.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not blaming my flight
instructor. Even if what we learned was valid, there's
no way that one person can possibly teach us everything we need to know. As pilots, we are responsible
for making sure that our knowledge comes from various sources, texts, and people.
I was giving a private pilot checkride recently and
asked the applicant to demonstrate a short-field takeoff in his Cessna 172. He put in 10 degrees of flaps.
However, the POH for that specific model (and many
of the older model Cessnas) recommended not using
any flaps for a short-field takeoff. When I questioned
him, he said, "That's how my instructor taught me
to do it." Later in the ride, I asked him to perform a
turning stall. "My instructor didn't teach me a turning stall," he said. At this point, I was starting to hear
a trend. This pilot was clearly trusting his instructor's

technedure rather than getting out the books and
verifying for himself what would be required on a
checkride and exactly how to perform those maneuvers in his specific airplane. We all want to trust that
our instructor knows the correct way to do everything,
but the truth is that even the almighty CFI is fallible.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of flying with
Catherine Cavagnaro, an aerobatics instructor who
often shares her knowledge with the lucky readers
of this magazine. In our prebrief, she asked me to
explain the spin recovery procedure. Without hesitation, I told her the acronym I could say in my sleep:
PARE (Power idle, Ailerons neutral, Rudder opposite,
and Elevator forward).
Catherine informed me that, yes, that was a general acronym, but that it wouldn't cover the nuances
of spin recovery for all aircraft types. In some aircraft,
such as a Piper Tomahawk, the published recovery
procedure is to apply full opposite rudder to the stop,
then push the control wheel fully forward, and then
check that the throttle is closed. For a Cessna 152,
however, the throttle is the first thing to check as
reducing airflow over the elevator will reduce the
angle of attack and be the most effective way to stop
the spin in that particular aircraft. There are even
some military aircraft that require aileron into the
direction of the spin. News to me! I believed my PARE
acronym always was the way to recover from a spin,
and I had passed on that bit of incomplete knowledge
to many students through the years.
Bottom line: Read the books for yourself. See what
your POH says for your specific aircraft. If you're using
one of aviation's many acronyms, did it come from an
official source or was it simply passed down through the
generations of instructors before you?
Here is a little advice from one of those instructors
who has been wrong more times than she cares to say:
Question what you know. Did you fly with one instructor for your private pilot training and never take another
lesson or read a new aviation book? What if that one
instructor was wrong? Or left something out in the limited 40 hours they had to shape you? What if there's
another right way to do it, a way that might work better
for you personally? Remember, a good pilot is one whose
knowledge base is ever growing. We're all student pilots,
no matter how many ratings we have.
AOPA
myaviation101.com

http://www.myaviation101.com

AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2020

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