Guest Blog: Reviving Stick And Rudder Skills

The Miracle on the Hudson is back in the news, with the big-budget flick Sully in theaters. For pilots, it's a stark reminder that basic stick-and-rudder skills still come in handy sometimes. Those skills certainly helped Sullenberger, whose four decades of experience included glider flying. But in my work as an FAA aviation safety inspector — and during my own four decades of flying, as a flight instructor, airline pilot and the owner of a taildragger — I've seen innumerable examples of pilots, at all levels of experience, who seem to have forgotten or never learned those basic skills.

All too often, I see commercial pilots who have forgotten what the rudder is for. You do remember adverse yaw, don't you? I've seen CFIs who allow their students to land nosewheel first, instead of properly flaring the aircraft, without blinking an eye. And I've seen all too many flight-test applicants who blindly follow the magenta line while navigating with their glass-panel GPS. If the screens went blank, would they have a clue about their position?

Besides my own observations, I hear similar complaints from seasoned air crews at the major air carriers about the new hires. The new hires know how to fly the systems, but basic airmanship is poor. By the time you're at a major airline, it's too late to learn those basic skills. Technology has improved tremendously over the years, and that's great, but we still need to have a firm grasp on the basics to use them effectively.

So now we have some instructors without a firm grasp of the basic skills, who in turn train students who become pilots without a firm grasp of the basic skills. These pilots go on to become instructors without basic skills, who train students without good basic skills ... you see where this is going.

So let's see if we can fix this. To do my part, some colleagues and I have started the New England Aviation Education Foundation (NEAEF), a nonprofit group devoted to reintroducing the importance of basic flight skills and stick-and-rudder expertise for today's pilots, CFIs and student pilots. For our first event, we've organized a daylong skills camp for CFIs, coming up on Saturday, Sept. 24, with a morning classroom session and then a two-hour session in a taildragger with an experienced instructor (click here for all the details). We'll focus on the basic flying skills — takeoffs, landings, and loss of control in those situations.

Will this fix the problem? No, but it's a start in the right direction. As Sullenberger put it in an interview, "For 42 years, I've been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15th, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal." What's in your bank account? Is your balance sufficient to meet any challenge? If you're not sure, then find a CFI who can help you to get there.