Proficiency by pieces

As I made my way through Redbird's "Winging It" series, I came across a nice description of progressive practice: "Proficiency by Pieces".

It is a short mention inside this video where Brittney Miculka simulates an in-flight problem. (I say "problem" because some of us would look at it as a full-blown emergency, whereas others call it a minor annoyance. Each pilot has their own mix of skill level, recent experience, and risk tolerance, so there is no One Right Answer.)

What I like about the phrase is that it sums up nicely what I've been discussing a lot this year: learning by little. Instead of looking at any task or skill as something to tackle all at once, break it up into smaller, more manageable tasks. Then break those small tasks into microtasks. Then start on one of them and just do it!

This approach is one also taken by an app I recently came across: Duolingo. It breaks down learning any of several languages into small chunks, then lets you work on however many or few of those you want to work on each day. This hits on two parts of effective and efficient learning: small and daily.

What my French tree looks like in Duolingo. Notice the 29-day streak!

I originally got my degree in Spanish. That, unfortunately, was almost 15 years ago, and I haven't had a chance to practice it much since then. I decided to take the pre-test to see how bad I had become. As it turns out, I wasn't as bad as I thought. I've been using it to shake the rust off, and the thing I had forgotten most about Spanish was how much I enjoyed Spanish!

Since I get flight benefits as a pilot, I'm planning on taking the wife to Paris sometime in the near future. It might help to learn French, obviously, so I've been using Duolingo to help me with that and to see how others put modern learning research into practice. I've been rather impressed on both accounts.

One of the things about becoming proficient in pieces is that even little chunks of time (I spend approximately 10 minutes a day on Duolingo) add up in the long run. According to Duolingo, I've learned over 500 words in French already! If you put a list of 500 French words in front of me and told me to learn them, I'd probably get up and walk away. However, by breaking the process into small bites and making those bites small enough that I can squeeze 29 consecutive days of them (it keeps track of that for you!) into my schedule, I've already learned 1/6th of the words that an average fluent speaker of most languages uses regularly.

It's free, so give it a try yourself. Although there isn't a "Duopilot" yet to help you learn aviation, you can do the same sort of thing yourself by doing things like studying five questions for the written exam you might be taking; opening up the FAR/AIM, the Pilot's Operating Handbook for your plane, or the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge to a random page and reading it; or looking at a random approach plate and mentally flying through it for five minutes (or setting it up in a flight simulator on your computer and flying it, although that might take 10-15 minutes instead).

If it's been effective for you, leave a comment and let me know. See you next Wednesday! (If time permits, that is. I'm away in St. Louis doing the final phase of my ERJ-145 training.)


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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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You never know who you'll meet

As a pilot, I have some amazing co-workers. One of them happens to be a former NFL player and fellow Northeast Ohio native. Here's a story about one of my fellow pilots, Flying High with Kevin Houser.

Most of us would be happy to have one of our childhood dreams come true. He made two of them happen!

One of the things that jumped out at me in the story is that when he was a kid, he actually asked pilots for autographs! The reason that is so interesting to me is that a lot of pilots—all the way from private pilots to other airline pilots—look at my job as routine. It's not routine to me, and I can't imagine it ever becoming so. Sure, there are some aspects of the job that become rote, but the job itself doesn't. To a kid, it's still an amazing job, and we have a responsibility as pilots to encourage kids to become pilots themselves. Learning to fly is a life changing experience, even if it's not a career.

There are many reasons for this, and I've covered many of them in previous posts. One of the most important ones is that when you think about it, I'm privileged to have one of the most amazing jobs in the world: I connect people safely and quickly in a modern aircraft at hundreds of miles per hour. In an average day, I can wake up in one state, have lunch in another state, dinner in yet another, and still be home the same day! Sure, that is a part of life in the 21st century, but I cover more miles in one day than 99% of humans ever covered in their lifetime just a century ago!

The High Poet of aviation, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, once said, "Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures -- in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." I still consider it an honor to be able to be part of it. It is an honor that took a lot of work to earn the right to be part of, but despite what others may say, it is an honor to do what I do for a living.

Houser himself echoes my sentiments at the end of the article:

With one dream in the rear-view mirror and the other dream afloat, Houser is loving life. “Just like other professions, flying has its ups and downs. However, everyday I fly, I get to see the world from a view that the good Lord has day in and day out. From my vantage point, I have a front row seat to watch glorious sunrises and sunsets, the beauty of active weather, and the tremendous accomplishments of society. Looking out and seeing the Statue of Liberty, the Freedom Tower, and Times Square never gets old, and the overwhelming emotion of spectating all of God's glory reinforces that this second career continues the blessings of the first.”

See you next Wednesday!


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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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And now I'm back again, Part 2

When I posted this, the entire blog post went Poof! Gone. All that work down the drain. Since it's done in the cloud, there isn't really a backup, either, since the cloud is supposed to be the backup!

Unfortunately, I don't have time to re-create what turned out to be a pretty good post right now, as I'm heading back to St. Louis yet again, this time for the last time for a while. I'm doing two weeks of simulator sessions, the checkride, and I'll have a shiny new EMB-145 type rating on September 14th!

In the meantime, here are some pictures I had in the original post:

The unusual 30-degree bend in the Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi.

View of downtown from the bridge. The Gateway Arch is barely visible at center left, in the notch in the trees.

Southwest 737 framed in the girders.

These guys started in Montreal and were doing the ride all the way from there to California via Route 66!

I will redo the rest of this post when I get back and let you all know when it's up. Until then, blue skies!

Like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook:

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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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And now I'm back again, Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, I formulated a simple plan of what to study and how much time to spend on it. Now that I'm back from St. Louis and the ground school portion of my transition to the 145 is done, how did it go?

Well, the bad news is that my final exam score only improved by 4% over how I did in ground school for the Dash.

The good news is that my Dash ground school score was 96%, which means I got 100% this time!

The even better news is that I spent much less time to accomplish that, thanks in large part to coming to battle with that plan.

I'll get more into the specifics of how I studied in next week's post. This week, I have a lot to catch up on at home, having been away for almost two straight weeks. However, I am pleased with how the plan turned out. That's because I accomplished more in less time, and time is the most precious asset any of us have.

Money is something that we can make more of. Some have a lot of it and some have little, but we can make more of it if we want and/or need to. Time, however, is given out in the same 24 hour packets to absolutely everyone. It doesn't matter if you're the richest person on the planet or you live in a van down by the river: everyone gets exactly the same amount of time. Saving it is saving life.

As I noted in my original plan, I had no intention whatsoever of studying on the weekend. That time was set aside for me to recharge and explore the city. I absolutely did that, too. In that spirit, Friday we checked out Salt & Smoke, one of the finest BBQ places in St. Louis.

I spent Saturday evening going to see where two of the most important rivers in United States history meet: the Missouri River and the Mississippi River.

Afterward, I hopped across the Mississippi to Alton, IL to check out their riverboat casino, then drove along the river for a while. I have been writing a book on the Mississippi River, so getting to spend some time checking it out was fantastic, and I even snagged a bottle full of water from it for my bookshelf.

Sunday, I headed to the Forest Park area of the city. This is where the 1904 World's Fair was held, and it is in an absolutely gorgeous part of town. I ended up walking over 7 miles all over the area, and along the way I saw the world's largest chess piece outside of the chess Hall of Fame:

It's in an area with old but well-kept houses. This one was obviously a schoolhouse over 100 years ago, but it's someone's very nice home now:

After grabbing a coffee at one of the 5 shops on the same block, I checked out the St. Louis Basilica:

A few blocks away, I came across the biggest fungus I've ever seen, and I have no idea what it is:

I spent the next three hours walking around the park, which also has the zoo in it:

There is a pretty lake in the southeast corner of Forest Park, with a tree that thinks it's the Gateway Arch:

Next week, I'll go into how I managed to get a perfect score and still have time to stop and smell the flowers. See you next Wednesday!

Like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook:

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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.