While I can't fly an airplane right now, I am fortunate that I am senior enough at my airline that I was able to avoid getting furloughed. Instead, I'm sitting at home on long-call reserve, getting paid to hurry up and wait. If airline flying picks up, I might get called in to do some flying that gets added back. For April and May, I'd estimate the chance of that happening as about .01%.
Like many, I've been wildly successful in handling this bounty of extra time to do things and wildly unsuccessful as well. One of the problems with being off for at least two months is that it's so easy to say, "Ehh, I'll just do that tomorrow," because there are so many tomorrows on the calendar now. I've certainly frittered away a lot of time already as "I'll just watch one episode on Hulu" becomes five episodes.
Nonetheless, I have been able to catch up on some of the "I'll get around to that someday" things as well. One of those things is catching up on reading research papers. While reading the scintillatingly-titled "Higher Landing Accuracy in Expert Pilots is Associated with Lower Activity in the Caudate Nucleus", I came across this passage that stood out:
In terms of expertise, there were differences between the two groups in flight experience and age. As expected, more hours of total flight experience, overall t (12) = 2.61, p<.05 and more hours of flight experience in the past month, t (11) = 2.62, p<.001 were associated with higher expertise. In addition level of expertise was associated with younger age, t (18) = −2.25, p = 0.045).In other words, how many total hours you have and how old you are have approximately the same impact on how well you would do in this study, but what is even more important by a large margin is how many recent flight hours you have.
This is particularly relevant in a time of social distancing and flight schools/FBOs being closed to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. (If your flight school isn't closed right now, IT SHOULD BE.) It's not exactly Earth-shattering news that your skills get rusty; everyone knows that. What struck me about that passage is how much more of an impact currency had on task performance than any of the three significant factors (total hours, recent hours, and age).
This is not the place to get into detailed statistical theory, so I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible by comparing only the p-values. There are much more sophisticated ways of analyzing the data, but a p-value is one of the most basic: it attempts to measure the probability that the result came about by dumb luck. In general, less than a 5% chance is considered acceptable; this would be p < .05. The researchers' values for these three were
- Flight hours last month: p < .001
- Age (younger): p < .045
- Flight hours total: p < .05
What's important to take from this is that while you're enduring a forced lay-off from flying, you need to be doing things to stay engaged with the cockpit to stave off rustiness. I'm certainly in favor of flight simulators: they are the most active way to practice and therefore will keep your skills sharper for longer.
In fact, if you use your time right, you can come out on the other side with skills you didn't have before, but in order to do this, you have to use the sim to do more than just replicate what you're doing now. As the saying goes, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses: things they're good at and things they're not good at. It's easy to practice the things you're already good at—after all, they're easy because you're good at them. What you need to do is figure out the things you're not good at and create scenarios in the sim that target those.
For example, let's say your home field is 5,000 feet long. Chances are you're not very good at short field landings then because you don't have to be. In that case, find a 1500-foot field and practice going into it. Since you're in a sim, there's no worry about bending metal: the only danger is a bruised ego the first time or two. Eventually, you'll think that 1500 feet is more runway than a 172 needs.
You'll find that the real benefit of this isn't just in being able to land at a short field. After all, in real life, you may still not have a short field near you to land at. However, you'll find that you've become a sharper pilot in other important ways that count every day. Your airspeed control will be much better because you can't add an extra 10 knots for the wife, 10 knots for the kids, 10 knots for the dog, and 10 knots just because. Your ability to gauge without looking at the altimeter whether you're too high or low will improve. Your feel for the relationship between power, pitch, and airspeed will improve. You'll develop better sensitivity for appropriate control/throttle inputs, and so on.
What's important is that you maintain what you have and use that as a base to build on. If you do it right, once you're able to climb back in the cockpit you'll have even more confidence than you did before!
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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 ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, 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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