SPC086 [BR] Fly. Learn. Repeat. Our New Mission

Welcome back, SPC listeners.

If you're checking your podcast app and wondering if you accidentally

subscribed to a history channel, don't worry, your ears aren't deceiving you.

It's just me, Bill, your humble host, back at it.

I know I've had more starts and stops than a student following

taxi instructions at a, I don't know, like a Bravo airport or Yuma.

Just trust me, it's a lot of starts and stops.

Anyway, today we're gonna rip apart exactly what's different this time

and why it matters in episode 86 of the Student Pilot Cast: Fly,

Learn, Repeat, our new mission

I know, it's true.

If pod fading were a rating, I'd be able to write the study manual for it.

But hey, I'll just start calling it a holding pattern or lost comms or

something that sounds a little better.

All right, I'll stop with the aviation metaphors for now, and

I'll let you know that I've finally been cleared for the approach.

Sorry, another one.

My bad.

Back then, I was just a guy trying to figure out which way

was up and why the airplane kept trying to turn left on takeoff.

Today, I'm a working CFI and double I, and while we know that stands for

Certified Flight Instructor, some days it feels more like constantly figuring it

Out.

All right, no, I know that was terrible.

I guess now that my kids are all grown, I've got the dad jokes just

flowing out of me spontaneously 'cause nobody's around to hear them.

So sorry, but not that sorry.

But back to what we were doing here.

Even though I'm the one in the right seat now, I've realized something.

The more I teach, the more I realize I'm still just a student with an

extra piece of plastic in my wallet.

The always a student mindset isn't just a motto for me or even for the podcast.

It's a philosophy that I think helps us stay frosty and stay alive, So before

I get into what the show actually looks like now, I wanna take just

a second on the new tagline because I don't want it to be just one of

those things that's on the cover art.

I want you to know where it came from.

to fly in front of the world," and that was exactly what I was doing.

I was a student pilot.

I was figuring it out in real time, embarrassing myself on the radio,

bouncing landings, and apparently deciding the world needed to hear all of it.

That was the whole premise of the show.

Then I got my private and even eventually finished my private

training on the podcast.

Then many years later, I got my instrument rating and kept going, eventually

earning my commercial certificate, CFI, CFII, and even my multi-engine.

And somewhere along the way, I think I made a quiet little realization.

No matter how far along I was getting in this new career of mine and in this

training, I always felt like a student.

If I started thinking of myself as someone who had arrived at a big

goal of mine, like I had crossed some invisible line from student to

instructor, I would get humbled, as aviation tends to do, and that would send

me right back into that student mode.

And then I started teaching, and I'll tell you, nothing will humble you faster

than taking on a responsibility like that.

It's a lot.

It takes a lot.

A lot of empathy, a lot of knowledge, a lot of skill, a lot of patience, and

maybe even some things I actually have.

But seriously, it's a huge responsibility, and the interactions with the students

and the experiences, the discussions, trials that I've gone through with

them have taught me more than I ever could have learned from the PHAK.

maybe more importantly, teaching makes me stay sharp.

It makes me stay in the game, so to speak.

Always learning, looking things up, developing lesson plans, and nothing

causes you to learn a topic better than having to explain it to someone

in a way that helps them learn it.

It's awesome.

So I've been learning a lot over the last 18 months since I started

teaching, and it's helped me realize how important having the always

a student mentality really is.

Here are a few things I think it does for us.

First, when you're not learning and practicing, your skills and

competency are definitely degrading.

In a very large study published back in nineteen ninety-eight, researchers

took a, a look at decades of data across high-consequence technical fields.

They found that significant skill decay occurs after just three hundred and

sixty-five days of non-use, or a year.

But here's the important thing: that a measurable degradation starts after only

twenty-eight days if the skill isn't constantly practiced or reinforced.

In a well-known study done by NASA, the Use it or Lose it study, as it's

colloquially called, they found out that specifically in aviation, cognitive

skills degrade very quickly when not being challenged, used, and practiced.

interestingly, the stick and rudder skills weren't the ones

that degraded the fastest.

They were much more durable than the cognitive skills.

But we all know the head work and the decision-making tends to be much more

important to safety than being able to handle the airplane perfectly.

They're both important, of course, but the former causes more death than the latter.

Another reason to always be learning is that technology in the cockpit, and

even mundane things like regulation changes, are moving targets.

They're constantly changing.

Things tend to change over time, and it takes study and intent to keep up with it.

Think about how technologically advanced some of our avionics are these days,

and if you aren't constantly training, reading, and learning from others about

them, you're going to someday find yourself relying on the technology but not

knowing how to effectively leverage it.

That distraction of misunderstanding or misinterpreting could

cost you, as we all know.

When things change, we better be up to speed.

Finally, continual learning helps with something else important, expanding

our capabilities and safety margins.

We often hear that when something bad happens and we're under pressure, we

don't rise to the occasion, we sink to our most recent level of training.

I can personally attest to•

this from my own experience, but that's a story for another time.

If we're not learning and training, that fall when we're under

pressure is gonna be a long one.

And Kent and I have talked about training to push the envelope one corner at a time.

This is how we get better and better.

Yes, this happens during formal training, of course, but it happens

every time we fly if we treat every experience as a learning one.

Good pilots are those who realize that they never know everything, and

that every flight is an important opportunity to learn something new.

This is how a newly minted pilot becomes an experienced, safe pilot over many

years of training or flying, because those are the same thing, flying and training.

This podcast is dedicated to that training process, formal or informal.

The name, "The Student Pilot Cast", is apropos since we're all students of this

flying thing if we're doing it right.

So the new tagline for the podcast, "Fly, Learn, Repeat," is my attempt

to try to encapsulate that ethos.

It's not just a tagline.

It's kind of like a checklist item or a way of approaching learning.

It's the reminder that the moment I think I'm done learning, I've

already started going backward.

So the fly part is important.

It's when we gain our experience and push our boundaries and

skills, and sometimes that's with an instructor and sometimes not.

The learn part is what we do to gain knowledge from the flying

part, but it also means we should be evaluating ourselves on every flight.

What went well?

What could we have done better, and why?

And sometimes, what was just downright scary that we should

avoid at all costs in the future?

Most importantly, what can we learn to be better next time?

Sometimes, of course, it also means reading, staying ready for when

things don't go quite as planned.

Finally, repeat.

Because it should remind us to never stop.

Never stop practicing, never stop learning, and never stop moving forward.

This tagline is perfect for me and for this podcast because seriously,

it's why I keep doing this show.

Talking to you all, hearing from you, producing content that forces

me to actually articulate what I know and why I know it, that's

part of how I keep learning, too.

That's part of an ethos that I keep trying to cultivate in my

own flying and in my own teaching.

I just think it encapsulates what I'm all about when it comes to aviation, and

even beyond aviation, for that matter.

So now you know.

Getting inside my brain can be scary, but hopefully you agree to some extent,

and hopefully that's why you're here

All right, so let's move on to the other big change, and this is

probably the one you'll notice most immediately, and that's how we're

organizing the show going forward.

It's changing slightly.

Honestly, one of the reasons I've burned out in the past is that single episodes

sometimes tried to do everything.

Long interviews, solo discussions, cockpit audio, whatever random

thing I was thinking about, sometimes all in the same episode.

It was a lot to produce, and I think it was a lot to track as a listener,

So we're gonna do some organizing to hopefully clean that up a little bit.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still gonna talk about whatever

random thing I'm thinking about.

I'm just gonna put a little structure around it.

The show now has four distinct series.

Each one has its own thing going on.

The first is the Cockpit Series.

You're gonna hear actual flights.

Sometimes watch them if I've got video with real students, real

pilots, real radio calls, real mistakes, sometimes solo, who knows?

Not recreations, not here's how it's supposed to be, but the real thing.

I'll, as usual, add voiceover layer afterwards where I walk you through

what was happening, what I was thinking, maybe what a student was

thinking, what the student was doing well, where we could have been better.

This will all seem familiar to those of you who've been around a while with me.

This was sort of the mainstay for much of the previous content on the podcast.

The second is Beyond the Checkride.

Again, if you've been listening recently, this will sound kind of familiar as well.

This one's a conversation, me and our buddy Kent, who's been flying real

world general aviation for years now.

Here's the premise.

The checkride tests whether you can fly and have basic

aeronautical decision-making skills.

Then everyone starts really flying, starts learning what's ha- what happens in the

real world, goes back to that experience that we were just talking about.

But some of these things are practical skills that just can't fit into the ACS,

and many students don't get a chance to learn a lot of them within the confines

of a structured flight school environment.

so Kent and I are gonna get into some of the stuff maybe your instructor never

really tells you while you're training.

What does your cross-country decision-making actually look like when

you're doing it alone for the first time?

How do you handle weather as a newly certificated pilot without either being

reckless or never leaving the pattern?

What does it mean to fly with real passengers and actually

feel responsible for them?

Heck, I don't know.

How do I even operate a fuel pump at a rural airport?

All of these are previous topics covered in Beyond the Checkride

episodes, so you hopefully get the idea.

This series will sound like two guys who've been flying for a while, because

we have, just shooting the breeze about an aviation topic that we learned

after the checkride, and hopefully that's what makes it useful and fun

All right, the third series is "The Briefing Room", short, tactical, and solo.

Just me, or usually just me anyway, 10, maybe 15 minutes on one thing, a

specific technique, an ADM concept, a regulation I see people getting

wrong all the time, or something I just learned or taught that seems like

it would be helpful to all of you.

No tangents, or at least fewer tangents than usual, which I'll

be honest, is a lot of tangents.

But the idea is that if you've got 15 minutes in the car on the

way to the airport or somewhere else, this is the one you throw on.

Quick win, hopefully.

And I'll try to keep it to maybe one terrible pun per

episode, but it's not a promise.

I'll, I'll try.

And then finally, there's "The Hangar Series".

This is the interview format.

We're going to shows like Oshkosh, Sun and Fun, and AOPA Fly-Ins, et cetera.

But also museums, CAF Wings, anywhere really where there's a chance to sit

down with people in this community who are doing interesting things.

Not only just household names, though hopefully we'll have some of those, but

also others who have something to offer.

Maybe a DPE who's seen 1,000 check rides and knows exactly where pilots fall apart.

Maybe a mechanic who understands these machines at a level most of us never will.

The CFIs who figure something out about teaching that changed

how their students learn.

Really, it's about the people whose stories that don't always necessarily

make it to the proverbial magazine cover, but absolutely should.

Aviation has always been full of remarkable people.

I wanna bring you into conversations with them

So four series, one feed, and I'm gonna need considerably more

No, I'm just kidding.

I don't even drink caffeine anymore, so I'm actually hoping this makes things

go smoother for all of you and for me.

You might also notice a bit of rebranding beyond the new

tagline and the organization.

We've changed cover art, logos, et cetera, to mark the new reboot and

to get things a little more updated.

But that shouldn't matter much from your perspective.

Maybe just a slightly different look in your podcast app of choice.

So for the first four new episodes, we'll publish one of each of these

series, and they'll be easy to tell which one they are in the feed.

After that while I'll try to keep a good mix, sometimes there will

be more of one series than another, especially around big events.

Or if we get some interesting people all at once to talk to us,

you know, we might stick on The Hangar series for a little bit.

That said, we'll tweak it over time, and we'd love to get feedback

on what's working and what isn't.

So reach out and let us know.

And there are a few ways to do that, by the way, including a new one.

You can always email me at bill at studentpilotcast.com

or use the contact form on the website at studentpilotcast.com.

But on that contact page, you'll see a new link to the SPC Radio Check page.

You can also find that page at studentpilotcast.com/voicemail.

There, you can record an audio message right on the webpage

right to us at the podcast.

You have 90 seconds to say whatever you want to.

So if you have a question, a comment, or a bad aviation pun that's just

too good to keep to yourself, use that Radio Check Record button.

And if it's interesting enough, funny enough, or a bad enough pun, it might make

it onto a future episode of the podcast.

So like I said, reach out.

Let us hear from you.

I'll put a link to that Radio Check page in the show notes as well, so no excuses.

So I'm really excited to see where we go from here, and I'm also really excited

to start reconnecting with all of you.

I've really missed you guys.

Let's make it fun while we learn as much as we can.

I'm grateful for the little break because it made me reconsider how I was doing

everything, what we were focused on, and what we want to center on going forward.

As you know, professionalism keeps us safe, personality keeps us flying

and keeps flying fun, and all of our relationships keep it worth it.

Now, let's get to work.

Still flying, still learning, and it turns out the holding

pattern had a purpose after all.