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Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Chunking: It's not just for peanut butter

There 86x more Lego blocks than there are people on the planet, according to the people who make them. With that many building blocks, you can make almost anything. For example, there is a replica of Mark Twain's house in the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire made of almost 125,000 Lego bricks:

The house is 7.5 feet wide and over 4.5 feet tall, and took over 4.5 months to build!
There are Lego versions of just about every aircraft ever made, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the White House (plus Air Force One to go with it), an entire set of New York City skyscrapers, "The Brick Testament" (a collection of biblical scenes done in Lego), a Lego Vegas, and an entire Wikipedia page on a fraction of the things that have been built with Legos. There's even a short humorous YouTube video detailing a day in the life of Lego Pilot:


To build anything you can imagine with a pile of small Lego bricks, you just start with two bricks and connect them together. You add another brick to that one, then another, and another, and so on. If you just want to build something small, it might not take very long and it won't require a lot of bricks. If you want to build a scale model of the Golden Gate Bridge, it might take months or years and will require tens of thousands of Legos. In either case, whatever you build is just one brick connected to another: it's how many you use and how you connect them that makes the difference.

Continuing with last week's theme from Coursera's Learning How to Learn class and accompanying book, your brain does much the same thing when you're learning. The brain has a stunning capacity to learn almost anything, from catching a softly-tossed baseball to hitting a 100 MPH fastball, from learning the rules of chess to playing a dozen games against a dozen people at the same time while blindfolded, and from looking up at the sky to learning to fly through it. It learns all of those things and any of a billion more by taking small bricks of knowledge and connecting them to each other.

Unlike Legos, however, you do not have the bricks to start with: you have to build them yourself through education and then putting that new knowledge into active practice. Once you make a brick, you can combine that new micro-skill with another brick (which you had to make yourself) and make a "chunk", which forms a basic fundamental. Chunk together enough of the fundamentals and you have a new skill.

In the case of flying, there are four of these fundamentals:
  • Straight and level
  • Turns
  • Climbs
  • Descents
Almost anything else you do when flying will just be one or more of these chunks put together in a certain way. A takeoff is just a climb; a landing is a descent turned into straight and level at an inch off the ground; a traffic pattern is all of these strung together into a several minute sequence.

This is why when you first start to learn to fly, it may seem almost overwhelming and like you're always behind the airplane. That's because at first, you're making those little Lego bricks every single flight, and then you still have to take those bricks and chunk them together. As your lessons progress, you start to create and firm together those chunks, which means each of them takes less mental effort as they become more automatic.

That sounds great, but why does it seem like just when you're getting one thing down, there is even more to learn? Shouldn't it be getting easier by now?

It will. At first, you're so task-saturated that you have no idea how much you're missing. Your instructor has been sitting over there taking care of all the other things you've been missing while you learn the fundamentals. The better you get at the fundamentals, however, the more of those tasks are shifted over to you. In other words, the better you get, the better you need to be!

A good instructor will hand those tasks to you at about the same rate that you're chunking together the other things, so for a while it will seem like you're always putting out a large amount of effort. Ideally, you will be putting in the same amount of effort, but you'll also be doing a lot more at the same time. After all, the goal is to get you to solo, where you'll have no choice but to be doing everything at once.

Learning to fly is hard work, but it's also fun work. A while back, I went into more detail about the "fun curve" of learning to fly. This constant workload concept is one of the reasons why there are two large dips in that curve.

However, almost everyone has a lesson when getting ready to solo where it seems like you just can't do anything right. Those days are frustrating because they so often come after a lesson where things were just starting to seem simple. I've both seen this happen as an instructor many times, and experienced it myself as a student pilot.

The good news is that almost every time, the very next lesson is outstanding, and it really starts to feel like flying makes sense! The chunking concept explains this as well. Sometimes the brain does some "remodeling" overnight as you sleep. It takes the chunks you've piled up, shifts them around, puts them in a new, nice, neat configuration, and glues them together. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a bit of time for the glue to set, so things are a little shaky until the new shape firms up. Once it does, however, you've taken the next leap.

So how do we create these chunks? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice. That's a subject that is so big that I could devote multiple posts to that alone. Fortunately, that's exactly what I'll be doing for the next two weeks! Next week's post will be on some general rules for effective and efficient practice so you can save yourself some time and money. 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.

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.


Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Learning How to Learn How to Fly

In 2015, the FAA counted 590,093 people as pilots. (That means that if you become a pilot, you'll do something that 99.8% of people have never accomplished!) That's well over half a million people, which seems like a pretty large number.

That is, it seems like a large number until you find out that there is a class on the internet that has had twice that number of students: "Learning How to Learn".

In college, the largest class I ever had was Psychology 221, "Educational Psychology", which had about 200 students, and it was in the largest lecture hall on campus. Most classes ranged anywhere from 6-30, so a class with over 1,000,000 students is a little out of the ordinary. Imagine how big a lecture hall you'd need for that many students!

Fortunately, there is no classroom required for this class, thanks to the internet and the technology it enables: the MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course. If you want to join that number, you can take it yourself for free at your own pace. After you register at Coursera's site, you can enroll in it or hundreds of others.

It is taught by Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor, and Terrence Sejnowski, who specializes in neuroscience. Oakley's lectures make up most of the course, and the class is based on her engaging and easy-to-read book called A Mind for Numbers. While you don't have to have the book to follow the course, the does go into more detail than she can go into in the series of brief lectures that makes up the course, so it is a useful and inexpensive companion.

Buy it and help support us at no cost to you!

While it is designed more toward learning math, science, and engineering, many of its lessons apply to flying as well. It is also packed with a world of other advice that is applicable to learning almost anything else, such as a new language. She also spends a lot of time explaining how to defeat procrastination by understanding how procrastination works. Sejnowski also contributes some modern research showing that exercise does indeed improve learning and explains how it does its magic, which is another reason to do it for those of us who need to get our medicals renewed to fly.

There are several main takeaways from the book and/or course. Here are some of them that are very important in learning how to fly or becoming a better pilot:

1. Chunking: Taking small units of learning and combining them into larger units called chunks. These chunks can themselves be combined into even larger chunks. Once a chunk becomes big enough, you've mastered a particular maneuver. Even something that seems simple like a takeoff requires a lot of smaller chunks items to be learned first: how to use the rudder pedals to steer, how to stay on centerline and correct for the various right-turning tendencies, how to use the elevator, and so on.

2. Practice alone doesn't make perfect: perfect practice makes better. Just practicing for the sake of practicing doesn't accomplish much—you must practice with focus. Your CFI will give you feedback when they are in the plane, but you must observe your own performance as well in order to understand that feedback. When you're in the practice area or getting ready for your checkride in the post-solo stage, there will be no one to give you feedback besides yourself.

3. Interleaving: Don't just practice the same thing over and over. Practice what your major objective for that lesson is a few times, then mix in something else for a couple of attempts. Go back to your major objective for a little bit longer, then try something else for a bit. It may seem like it might not be as efficient, but there is a lot of research demonstrating the power of interleaving.


This is just a very brief overview of these concepts. Giving them the space they deserve would take up several blog posts. So that's exactly what I intend to do for the next several weeks: go into each of them in a more useful level of detail.

A final piece of excellent advice from A Mind for Numbers is the "Law of Serendipity":

Lady Luck favors the one who tries.

If you've been putting off learning to fly for any of the dozens of reasons people always seem to have (not enough time or money are the two most popular), you won't become Lucky Lindy until you take that first step and set up a discovery flight at your local flight school.

Next week, I'm going to start expanding on how to apply each of these highlights to your own flying. See you next Wednesday!

Like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook:





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.


Wednesday, January 13, 2016

How to take it to a new level this year

Hello world! The holiday hiatus is over at Keyboard & Rudder, and it's time for the new weekly posts to start rolling. Here's hoping your year is off to a great start!

As a side note before we begin, I spent the time away from the blog doing what many of you probably did: with family, having a big dinner and opening gifts. However, l've also been absorbed in writing a book; a project that has now become so large it will probably end up as two books. To that end, I've been reading piles of books and scientific papers on learning and expertise, taking a free online course called "Learning How to Learn" through Coursera, and using some of the material I've been poring over to use myself as a guinea pig and see if the research actually works.

It has taken up a lot of my writing time and energy, but I think it will lead to an exciting start to the year's posts. The first portion of the year will cover a large amount of material on how to get started learning to fly and how to make the process more effective and efficient (meaning cheaper) for you.

Since the beginning of the new year also brings along resolutions to break, let's begin with some suggestions on easy things to do (or do more of) throughout the year, broken down by pilot level. Pick and choose as many or as few as you like, and keep this year rolling strong!

All levels (including non-pilot, just curious, or haven't started yet)


Learn to use a flight simulator (Microsoft Flight Simulator X, X-Plane, or something similar). There are a lot of people who say that flight simulators don't teach you about flying. They are wrong. I could write a book about how much you can learn from simming—in fact, I'm writing just that book right now.

Read Fate Is the Hunter: A Pilot's Memoir. The best collection of one person's flying stories ever written.


Read North Star over My Shoulder: A Flying Life. Almost tied with Fate is the Hunter for best aviation writing ever.

Student pilot

Read Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying. It's never too early to read the book that's so good this blog is named after it!

Sign up for the FAA's free WINGS program. If you request it, they will email you when a pilot seminar is coming to your area. You can earn a real set of wings to pin to your lapel by completing different topics in different phases, and your private pilot checkride earns you them all at once! (I got a gold set of Master wings myself when I completed my ATP checkride.)

Two excellent, free resources are the weekly pilot tips email from pilotworkshops.com and Tom Turner's Flight Lessons Weekly. I am working on a short weekly email as well (details to come soon).

After a lesson, review what you've done by doing it in a flight simulator. Combine the sim with the Airplane Flying Handbook section covering what your lesson was about. If you really want to make fast (meaning cheaper) progress, follow along with the book Microsoft Flight Simulator X For Pilots Real World Training, which is the best book on the market (until mine gets done!) for blending the sim and the real worlds.

Private pilot


Re-read Stick and Rudder.

Solidify a "maneuver of the month". Pick something that you had to do for your checkride and practice it whenever you go up until you can meet double the standards you had to meet for your checkride.

Add a rating or different type of flying machine like a glider. I'm planning to get a seaplane rating this fall. I will never use it, as there are no seaplane bases in the state, but it is something that will get me away from the routine flying environment I spend every day in and make me stretch my skills. That last part alone makes it worth it, even if I never touch anything on floats again. Do something that makes you stretch your skills.

Go somewhere you haven't been.

Spend 30 minutes a week memorizing the boldfaced items in Section 3 of your POH. Most pilots make it all the way through their checkride without ever finding out that the bold items in the emergency section are supposed to be done from memory before even reaching for the POH!



Volunteer with Pilots & Paws, Wings of Hope, etc. There are dozens and dozens of organizations that would love your help, and you get to fly for a cause! Fortunately, to make it easy to find the one that is right for you, the Volunteer Pilots Network has compiled a list of all of these organizations.

Instrument pilot

 

Spend 90 minutes a week (just a half-hour three times a week) reading the Instrument Procedures Handbook. You can download it for free from the FAA's website or buy a printed copy on Amazon.

Once you've finished the Instrument Procedures Handbook, use those 90 minutes to make your way through 8260.3B - United States Standard for Terminal Instrument Procedures (TERPS). It's dry and technical, but you'll become a better instrument pilot by making it through it. Your instrument training taught you how to fly instrument approaches. The TERPS manual teaches you why those approaches are the way they are.

Use the sim to practice two approaches per week. Over the course of a year, that adds up to over 100 practice approaches! That's almost as many instrument approaches as I fly in a year (although if I'm shooting an instrument approach, it's because we're in actual IMC that day), but it costs you nothing.

Don't just shoot random approaches, however. Pick two different kinds of approaches. Do one of them several times over several sessions, and do a new one every time, too. In other words, do something like this:

ILS A + GPS B
ILS A + NDB C
ILS A + LOC D
ILS A + VOR E
GPS B + NDB C
GPS B + LOC D
GPS B + VOR E
GPS B + ILS F
ILS F + NDB C
ILS F + LOC D
ILS F + VOR E
ILS F + GPS G
NDB H + LOC I
And so on.

Pick an ILS that has a DME arc into it, as that will really keep your scan moving. If you use a rotating schedule like the one above, you'll end up doing more ILS approaches than anything else. There are two good reasons for this. First, the ILS approach is the one you're most likely to encounter in real life. Second, the ILS approach is one of those things that is easy to understand, but hard to master.

In the near future, I'll devote an entire post to what makes a good practice approach, how that weird-looking interleaved schedule works, and why it looks like that.

Commercial pilot

Re-read Stick and Rudder. Seriously. I re-read this book every even-numbered year, and I still learn something new about flying every time I go through it.

Volunteer with Pilots & Paws, Angel Flight, etc. or any of the dozens of other worthwhile organizations.

Teach yourself something new. (Especially if you're planning to become a CFI.) Don't just read it, learn it! Next week's post goes into learning how to learn, so you won't want to miss that one.

You had to learn how to do chandelles and lazy eights for your checkride. Use the Airplane Flying Handbook (free from the FAA or buy a printed copy on Amazon) and break down those maneuvers into their smaller components. Focus on getting each of those smaller components absolutely perfect and you'll understand why you had to learn them instead of just mechanically performing them.

An example of something you can teach yourself is a concept that most pilots don't understand even at the commercial level: what manifold pressure actually is. Research it until you understand it (it's the opposite of what many pilots think it is), then explain it to someone else.

If you're planning to go to the airlines, absolutely read The Turbine Pilot's Flight Manual. I wish I had known about this book before I started ground school at my airline.

ATP


By this point, you already know what skills you need to improve (because everyone has something they could do better). Figure out what it is, make a goal to improve it, and achieve it.

However, the biggest thing you can do at this level is to give back to the aviation community. Mentor student pilots, talk to children about flying to get them excited about aviation and how they can become pilots themselves, answer questions on forums (and not just the airline pilot forums where everyone complains about how bad their company is), volunteer to take kids on Young Eagles flights.

The most important thing you can do with expertise is to share it, and if you've reached the ATP level, you probably have a passion for aviation that needs to be shared with others.


Next week, I'll get into more details about "Learning How to Learn", which is an excellent class that costs you nothing that may help you throughout this year and beyond. See you next Wednesday!

Like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook:





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.