Sunday 29 July 2012

Make a decision, dammit!

PDM or Pilot Decision Making. I suspect this is going to be a real challenge for me. I am usually very happy to delegate all responsibility to other people. If there is someone up in the plane with me I will quite happily defer to their judgment in anything. This is going to be a problem of course because eventually the dreaded S word will happen and there won’t be anyone there to tell me what to do.
To give you an example during my first circuit lesson I was asking Bob about everything. Should I turn here? Do I put my flaps down now? Should I do this now? And so on.

I suspect that Bob, being the evil genius that he is, has spotted this trend. On our last circuit of the lesson, he seemed strangely distracted by the radio and consequently didn’t seem to be available to answer such questions. I quickly realized I had a choice. Either wait for him to do something about our situation or fly the plane. I chose the latter and somehow we managed to find ourselves on the final leg with the required 20˚ of flaps happily floating down to the runway.

Well played, sir! J

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