The Internet provides most of us excellent access to continued learning in many fields. This learning comes in the form of shared experiences, dedicated training and opportunities for us to learn by doing. Pilots are students for life and the pursuit of safety and proficiency is an unending goal for pilots.
Recently, #PilotEdge founder Keith published videos that journaled his trip from the East Coast to the West Coast. The video set is titled – #RealWorldCoastToCoast and is available from #PilotWorkshops. The video describes Keith’s journey from New Jersey to Los Angeles in an experimental Lancair aircraft. Keith flies the entire distance alone, captures the entire journey on video by wearing multiple cameras on himself. The videos are broken in segments each mirroring one leg of his flight. For each flight leg, Keith provides a dedicated video segment that describes his pre-flight flight planning activity. Similarly, he also provides another video segment where he debriefs the flown segment.
I found the videos to be extraordinarily valuable and here are the different reasons why.
- Not very often does one get to see such a milestone journey be completed by a single pilot in a single-engine plane.
- Not often is such a journey journaled in this level of detail.
- It is extremely valuable to see the journey journaled in video, minute by minute and without being paraphrased.
Secondly, it is immensely valuable to see it happen live. Especially when you get to observe all the thinking that goes into flight planning and then observe how often many of those assumptions come undone while en-route. Having the tenacity to deal with those in real-time is absolutely critical and the videos clearly demonstrate that. A few examples follow…
Keith has poor radio comms early on in his journey. The issues it poses in congested airspace and his approach to mitigating risk is learning. At another point, he finds out that the runway at one of his selected airports is shorter than anticipated due to construction. To complicate matters, this is at a high elevation airport which means longer takeoff roll as it is. The quick analysis, math and his approach to determining his airplanes performance at that airport is a quality lesson on how one can be called upon to improvise on the fly. Keith speaks about the importance of good pilotage, dead reckoning skills. He constants looks for landing options and ensures his situational awareness. With the growth of GPS devices, and more recently the iPad as an EFB, native pilotage has been taking a back seat. There is an increasing dependance on electronic devices in flight. There is no doubt that they make for better situational guidance. However, they can also serve as distractions. There are many stories about pilots who are pre-occupied with, and heads-down in, their electronic devices rather than being alert and looking outside. Although Keith uses the iPad extensively for his journey, you never find Keith heads-down in it for any enduring period of time. There is also the risk of these electronics failing leaving the pilot with few choices other than going back to basic principles of VFR flight. There is more than occasion when he is faced with electronics failure for simple reasons such as overheating of the device from prolonged use. Cross-referencing techniques are practiced and demonstrated all through the journey. At one high altitude airport, Keith is faced with tuning the automated weather frequency only to find that it is out of service. He overflies the field and finds no windsock either. He decides to use groundspeed to determine which way the winds are flowing around the field. Another lesson! His arrival into KLAX is masterfully completed.
These are but a few of those lessons. The video series is filled with them.
Third, the debrief sessions where Keith describes what went wrong or where something could have been done better provide important lessons.
Experience is a great teacher, however, it isn’t always possible to experience everything yourself. Learning from being a part of someone’s experience is next best available tool. Reading was the traditional method. Audio brought it to life, but seeing it in video form and living through that journey.. flight by flight, segment by segment… is a very valuable model for learning.
I would recommend the product to anyone pursuing the goal of being a safer pilot…
Note: I purchased the product and I wrote this review to describe why I found the product valuable. I have not been paid to provide a review.
CPJ
