Hey guys, just wandering if anybody else ever has the same problem I do. I am a instructor along with a couple of other guys at our club. And on the pretty weekends we usaully have more students than instructors. It seems like between training for IMAC and instructing it is hard to find time to go over a plane completely before a test flight for the newer guys at the field. I usually just get a chance to ask them if the batteries are good if the CG is close before the flight. Sometimes I land one plane and they already have the engine running and tuned up on the new one. Like doing a driver change in nascar, and it drives me crazy. I don't want to be a jerk and tell them to tear it all apart so I can look inside and say ok, because half the time they won't listen anyway. I remember years ago when someone braught a new plane to the field there would be a circle of old guys going over it. I was a early teen at the time but now I'm one of the old guys so don't get mad old guys!! I think alot of it has to do with the ARF revolution and that people just are not as interested at looking at a cookie cutter plane. Which I have to say, I do miss all the neat kits coming out and all of the different planes always at the field, but I am as guilty as anyone else about having the arfs in my garage.

Back to the subject obout about crappy preflights, I have had a couple of close calls do to elevator related problems control arm coming off elevator and 2/56 rod pulling out of dowel rod. I was able to get the planes down both times, but how many times can thing happen and your skill and luck get the plane back. I wish we could go back to the old days where everyone helped the new guy instead of just a couple of over worked guys trying to get everybody in the air a few times a day. Does anyone have any problems like this or is it just a problem at our club. I am pretty new at this club but it seems to be alot the same other places I go. I was atlking to a kid at a funfly a few weeks ago that has been trying to learn to fly and keeps tearing up his plane, he said no one will help him when he comes out, so he takes off crashes and walks out to pick up the pieces himself, we still always have a recovery posse when a plane goes in, maybe because they want to see the wreckage. But I was just wandering if this is the trend we are in now or if it is a isolated thing.



Why dont the plane move with the sticks!!

Its not as isolated as you think. In my club of approximately 60 people, I currently have 5 people learning to fly. On a good day, I'll have 2-3 other people out with me, but its not uncommon for me to be going it alone.

Having said that, I don't care how much work it takes the student, but if I have never done a preflight on the plane, I won't fly it. The first time a student comes to the field, I go over the plane with them from nose to tail, and check everything. Then on subsequent days, I do a more abbreviated pre-flight. It only takes a couple minutes, but its worth it.

Having said that, a few weeks ago i had a student flying a Sig Kadet. I had grounded it two weeks earlier because I didn't like the CG. The following week, one of my other instructors flew it and it was OK. The next week I flew it with the student. When I came in for a landing, the LG ripped right off the bottom of the fuselage. Turns out, he had only epoxied the LG to the bottom (over the covering no lesss). Its a wonder it hadn't ripped out the week before. Since it had already flown, I hadn't checked the LG mounting. No serious damage, but it was a little embarrassing.

Sometimes being a nice guy to the student (flying the plane without the preflight) is absolutely the wrong thing. Be a little stricter, teach them how to do a proper pre-flight, and they'll thank you many times over in years to come. They'll get fewer flights that day, but they'll have many more flights in the future.

Brad

Consider the owner of the plane. If the plane is owned by the student, make sure he completely pre-flights the aircraft. Teach/explain what needs to be checked and why. Do that no matter what. Watch him do it after you show/tell him what needs to be done. Use the show and tell method followed by a 'you do it now' attitude.

If the plane is a club trainer, what I do is gather the students around (we did that for a group of four a short time back) and show them what I do for a pre-flight and a complete system check right down to the range check, to pulling on control surfaces (hinges), checking the servo linkage and servo arm screws (I've seen them loose), throttle settings so that it is not jammed to the ends of either the throttle or the servo stops, and so on.. binding in the linkage, aircraft covering is not flapping around, all that stuff. I show them what I do then make one or two of them do it as soon after I show them. Then, just prior to the student's turn at the buddy box, I make him do a cursory system check to make sure he understands what needs to be looked at and why. I then make sure that all controls work as intended (elevator goes up when the stick is pulled back, the right aileron goes up with right aileron input -- do these checks for both the buddy box and the main transmitter... and so on.

DS

This may take a half hour, but it will be the best half hour spent on that plane and with the student. It develops good habits and a routine that will save aircraft.

At our field the instructors ask the tough questions and if you don't know the answers then they have you check. As an example what is the voltage reading on your flight pack? What is the reading on your transmitter? If they can't tell you and they have to check they either didn't do it or pay attention. Remember its not just the student and the plane you are protecting it is also everyone else including theat little kid and future flyer in the field. If they have to pop off a wing or pull a hatch at the least it gets them in the habit. Also every new plane has to get a preflight before you can even start the engine the first time or it doesn't fly. If you emphazise saftey it becomes second nature for the new pilots, full scale pilot instructors demain it we should too. The AMA saftey code doesn't say do it if its convienient it says do it!

Yeah, you're right. I recall my instructor asking some interesting questions of me when I was getting my flight instruction, both before and after flights and also during. He usually asked questions regarding flight characteristics during actual flight, then before or after, he would hit me with some pretty good ones.

He often walked up, looked things over, then if all was ok, would pick up the transmitter and start things going (meaning have me do the prep and starting procedure). If things did not go well, he would simply walk away and allow me to figure it out for myself. If I had trouble with it, he would come over and offer some hints always allowing me to think for myself. I learned a lot that way, so I use that with my students too.

Works every time!!

DS.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions, but it is not as easy as that. I'm not new to flying or instructing, I'v been instructing for over 13 years and this is the first time I have ever had a problem like this. The planes appear to be fine during a quick check before takeoff, and these guys are not beginners, they are alot of times on their second or third plane, and still making these mistakes. I do not personally do a preflight on every one of their planes as I expect them to do the preflight themselves. I make it a point to go over every new students plane before it is ever flown to find the little problems that first time flyers make, but there are sometimes little things that don't raise their ugly little head until a few flights later, and I can't be there watching over their shoulder all the time. All I can do is ask them the basics while taxing out. I'm more frusterated about the experienced club members sitting on the benches shooting the crap, while a couple of guys try to take care of everything. I don't want to spend all day instructing or looking over other peoples planes anymore than anybody else, but I like teaching to much to quit. I just would like a little help so I can enjoy flying my own stuff as well. I was just wandering if this is becoming common occurance elsewhere, if so we have got to find ways to turn things around a little bit.

Thanks

It seems you might be hitting on a politically correct, ego driven, nerve here. I was blessed when I learned because everyone wanted to help. There wasn't a "pre-ordained" instructor. At some of the clubs I'm a member at, some of the instructors are out of control them selves!

It should be emphasized, that it is a flattery to you when some one comes and asks you for help. This person asking for help cares about his investment not only in the "hardware" but in the actual learning how to fly.

Not too many beginners come and ask me for help, now-a-days. Maybe its because I'm only flying jets now and they can intimidate anyone, however, I love to help other people become successful and acquire safe flying procedures.

I think the solution to your problem would be to continue to have dedicated instructors, but make it so that everyone can help every one!! Not just instructors.

Raf

use and practice the magic words.......stop, slow down, or I need a sec.
Sounds to me your letting your students fly you guys. I know its tough to be one of a couple of instructors and a bunch of students want to fly, been there.
you can try a couple of things...set aside a training day in the middle of the week, where students have priority in flying. like a Wed. thats the day where the student is king, any other day and flight instruction is catch is as catch can. This allows an instructor to fly for himself on weekends, or teach if he wishes.
other than that your not doing a student any favors by allowing your self to be rushed, so use those magic words from above
Good Luck

You should ask yourself a question:
instructor or supervisor ?

If you are instructing then instruct,, on every aspect of the hobby..

If you do not have the time then do the person you are to be instructing
and yourself a favor,, make the time or pass on that days lesson..

Sadly it is all too common in todays world that many people do not wish
to help others,, yes,, even in this H O B B Y ....

For me the best answer would be,, if you are going to instruct then do it..
But do it totally,, for you,, for your student,, and for those that could be effected..

Flying is fun..
Instructing is <usually> fun..
Helping someone else to have fun is major fun..

Hey Waydown,
Not sure I understand what you are saying. You as pilot in command ( even if is not your aircraft ) don't have time to pre-flight the aircraft? You as pilot in command are going to fly a airplane that may not be flight worthy? You as pilot in command would stick your neck out and risk others safety and risk others equipment?

In my opinion I think you need to fly your aircraft and when you have time be the instructor/test pilot. If you cant do both on the same day, pick a day to instruct and test fly. It sounds like you really want to help others, that's great! But read your original post, what are you thinking?

Brian-

hi there. a couple years ago i was the new guy just trying to get my plane into the air. some of those "old guys" looked over my rtf trainer and luckely enuf i didnt have to change a thing. but in time i have become comfotable with my brief pre-flight which includes basic structure checks control surfaces and engine tuning with a daily range check. but even still today i was flying and my club field and i pulled vertical stalled my plane (intensionally) recovered and out of the corned of my eye i see something shiny fall from the sky. when i passed by where i was standing i noticed that my nose gear looked a little weird. after another fly by i realized the my nose wheel was hangin by the control arm. i then proceeded to make my first crash landing and performed a perfect landing minus the nose wheel. no extra damage just a couple of stupid screws that even under a decent pre-flight still manage to be over looked. there was no warning that the nose gear was loose. absolutly no awkuward control respone nothin.

Mmmmmm! Also being a full scale pilot I know all about the importance of preflights and inspections. I think you are misunderstanding, if one of the other experienced flyers checked out the plane I would fly it without looking at it. And I do a complete preflight on new studentsplanes, but I'm talking about guys that are on their second or third plane. I feel that there comes a point that you have to give some resp. to the owner of the plane. If they ask for help looking it over, I'm more than happy to go through it with them, but if they hand me a transmitter and say here you go, GAME ON!! What is bothering me is the lack of help from other members, what has happened to the hobby, and what is up with everybody saying I'm endangering others, GEEES!

I guess we misunderstood your post.
If guys are bringing you their 2nd and 3rd planes for a test flight or preflight... well it's nice to be trusted. perhaps they didn't ask anybody else.
Try this... "tell ya what, I've been watchin you. You're a good pilot. test fly it yourself. However I'll stand next to ya in case theres a problem. Is that ok?"
Now if all is good you can watch and coach, and as soon as he's down you can go with a pat on his back and a "nicely done"

Sounds to me like you need some help, your only one man.
I think I would ask the " instructers " for help..

Yea JT the guys are getting to be better pilots all the time and I know they could handle the planes themselves, it is just getting them to trust themselves. Yesterday we had a guy try to test fly his hellcat it ended up destroyed in the dirt. There was a cross wind and he had a engine failure and you can imagine the results. That kind of thing seems to scare the less experienced pilots to trying test flights. I can understand them, because I had flown a couple of years before doing my first test flights, and after over at least 200 of them I still get nervous at times. But, I didn't mean for this post to get so side tracked in blame, I am interested in what the hobby is going to in the next few years, and what it is going to be like. I am afraid it is heading in the direction of everybody showing up to fly, a screw everyone else attitude. I don't want to lose the days I had as a bright eyed kid being adopted by a bunch of old men telling stories all day long, and flying some neat planes. I would like for my kids to have the cherished times I did at the flying field, and I don't think it will ever be like that again. Lets all get together and quit bickering about club decisions, rules, people and all the other stuff that becomes political bs, leave our little groups and go talk to the guy that is standing there by himself and give him a hand, or invite that little kid on the bleachers to fly your plane. We need to get the magic back in flying or there will be no reason to fly anymore.

Thanks everyone,
Mike

If at first you don't succeed, fly again!![8D]

Here's the deal, back when people actually built their planes and that was the norm, you would go over every submicro detail that went into it, fine tuning it, not skimping in any area and not rushed to complete it. If you did opt to cut a corner, in the back of your mind you are thinking, do I really want to risk it all over one little detail I overlooked, or skimped upon considering how much time I put into this plane? You don't just pre-flight, you pre-pre and pre-flight it entirely on your own because you don't want something to go wrong and lose your plane.

With modern ARF's and RTF's, they are assembled at the factory at the absolute lowest end costs possible in order to be marketable. These are not the same planes at all, neither the owner can take full pride or control over how they are assembled, well, not without heavily revising one, entirely because that part has been taken out of their hands. I've had some really weird stuff happen with ARFs no pre-flight could have predicted, and it was just how they are put together. When I crash an ARF, I think, well, there is something I gotta do differently with it, either to handle the crash better, or to prevent it due to failure of some sort.

I like to scratch build new designs, so play test pilot alot, and with some of these planes I fly, you are literally rolling the dice to see if it's going to fly at all, and if so, how is it going to perform or react. I always test these out in secluded areas so I don't have to worry about harming others, but even with these creations, I know what hardware I put into them as well as the overall structure itself, but given, with the ones that crash, or have hard landings, the pre-flight get's taken well past the usual and everything is triple checked and stress tested before taking it up again.

I feel for you old man, these kids just don't want to go to extreems detail wise and it's putting strain on you to keep them up in the air, not to mention the pressure, and having them be kind of off to boot really makes it even harder. Maby if you crashed a few, they'd think twice about not doing the pre-flight better, then again. I do think having them rolling down the runway right after landing is a bit much for anybody though, you may have to just tell these guys that you want to B.S. in the back with the rest of the members as well, or at least take a short break between flights, that pace would drive me nuts and take all of the fun out of your day.

Heres my routine, and like you, I have limited time so I keep each session to 10 to 15 minutes.

First lesson: 10 minutes on my trainer to keep them interested and give them some stick time on a plane that is properly set up and trimmed.

Next lesson(s): 10 minutes of tearing down and doing a pre-flight / post-flight inspection of their plane. Showing them how to set up a logbook and noting location of key controls and making adjustments and corrections to those controls and to log everything they do so that I can sign off their "homework" at the next session.

Future lessons: We do not fly the plane until they can demonstrate that they understand how to set up a plane for safe flight. If they don't like that and just want to learn how to burn holes in the sky, they can find another instructor. I teach so that they can fly many solo flights on the same plane without taking it home in a bag.

I have found it useful to give people who are interested in learning to fly a sort of sylabus that explains what we will be going over during the training period. One of the requirements I ask for is the instruction manual for their plane if they have it.

I basically instruct RC like I was instructed in flying full scale.

As far as test flying other peoples planes: The number one rule is that YOU are the one in charge, and only you are responsible to check the plane out before flying it, and if YOU do not feel safe about flying it, then don't fly it, ground it and go over with the owner your concerns. Once you take it off the ground, it is your responsibility for not checking the battery, elevator, rudder, ailerons, fuel system, retracts, and etc. when something goes bad. Trust me, I have had more than a few times where I was more excited then the owner to fly a new warbird and overlooked a few major flaws in order to get into the air.

Scott

Thanks guys, but things are looking better. I've got one guy soloed now, and one of the other students decided to fly on his own and destroyed his trainer, bad for him but he needed a new trainer anyway so he will be down for a few weeks. I've got to say thanks for all the productive comments and encourage everyone to go help others this year, we need it!! Hope everyone has a great year of flying and keep the props turning.

There is something about these forums that you cannot get anywhere else, it's that collective experience and people willing to give valuable input that has really helped me in the past as well. I had to teach myself how to fly, I have a LHS, where the owner is an expert pilot and he told me early on that he'd be willing to show me the ropes, but when ever I brought a plane down there, he made one excuse after another to not help me learn to fly. I have another, again, another expert pilot was one of their staff members that I'd see on the field from time to time, same scenereo, even though I explained to these guys, if they wreck it, I'm not going to be upset, I'm a builder by nature, so I can always fix it, just to eliminate them having to worry about that element and take the pressure off.

I ended up wrecking several planes in the process, rebuilt them countless times and reached a point where I'm now a very capable pilot, no thanks to them at all. I pushed my skills forward even further by building and flying, "sometimes just a sad attempt" planes that were clearly beyond my skill level, yet after coming up with a certain philosophy about the proper mindset, I'll share later in this post, I really pushed my flying ability forward very quickly. Now, I'm at the point where I prefer prototypes because I don't know how they are going to react in the air, it keeps me on my toes and adds to the excitement. I rarely get nervous when flying a new plane, even the faster ones because I'm confident I can counter most problems and keep them aloft one way or the other, that or I know when it's time to simply land them and make some revisions if they are too far out of whack for the transmitter trim to make up for.

Nobody has mentioned the sim's yet, those are the single most invaluable tool we have at our disposal, and I will not take someone new to this out on the field unless they have alot of sim time under their belt, this really is a huge time and plane saver and should be mandatory for any instructor to enforce the student to use, FMS is free if their is a budget element.

Another thing I developed is a drill type of approach where I hand them the transmitter and give them verbal instructions, taking note as to how they are handling the controls, I'll tell them, up, down, left, right, more throttle, less throttle and run through several random variations in real time, if not faster then what they are going to encounter in the sky. If they stumble through them, make the wrong course corrections, we drill until the point they do not make those mistakes. This is a good system and will give you a good indication as to the pilot's ability to handle the sticks. The last guy I took out to the field made too many mistakes on the ground with them and ended up being upset since I wouldn't let him take control of the controls, but I'd rather the plane "mine" not be turned into packing material due to his arrogance "he's a real pilot, so obviously these rc planes are much easier is his underlying theme", I'll let him buy his own and turn into packing material in that case, he's got to learn the hard way. The one before, the kid was 12 years old, he solo'ed a perfect flight on his very first flight and was thrilled to be able to keep it airborn, all I did was bark control instructions, and technically he didn't even have to look at the plane, but was thrilled with the fact, his plane was flying under his controls.

Along the mindset, they must get it in their head, they are in charge and control of the plane, if it wants to veer off, make sudden turns due to the wind or other factors, they are the ones that must force it to react to their controls, kind of like "no you don't, I command you to go here!!!" type of mentality. It's building that confidence in the ability to control the plane that is paramount, if they simply are there to steer it around, hoping the plane reacts the way it's supposed to, chances are, they are flying behind it and are going to get in trouble since their reactions are going to be delayed.

Here is something that I am surprised nobody has considered yet...

A few months after I soloed I purchased a new airplane and was very nervous about taking it up, so I asked some instructors if they could look at it. The instructors asked me some questions about the setup and told me that I had been soloed and that I knew enough about the models to safely fly. They would not look over it any further (they weren't being rude or mean). I thought this was bizarre, but never gave it another thought. A few months later after I had flown the plane many times I figured out what a favor they had actually done me. I was like a bird that had been kicked out of the nest. They forced me to be completely self sufficient despite my worries after they knew I could handle it. This had made me a more competent pilot, more sure of myself, and made maiden flights much less of a worry. I had gained so much because they did so little after they knew I was ready.

That was the most important lesson they ever taught me.