VRFW 006: Flight Simulation and Flight Training Tips from a Qualified Flight Instructor

Speaker 1: Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast, the place where flight training and your home office collide. Get tips, tricks and in depth interviews about flight training, virtual reality and flight simulation, with your host, Dan Caston.

Dan Caston: Hey everyone and welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast. Today we have our very first guest on the show, B.J. Slater. Very excited to have him on here and I know he’s gonna share a lot of great information with you. He is a flight instructor from the Chicago area. I won’t hold you up any longer. Here’s our first interview with B.J. Slater.

Dan Caston: So, welcome to the podcast, B.J.. Glad to have you here.

B.J. Slater: Yeah, thanks for having.

Dan Caston: Yeah, excited to have a flight instructor on the podcast and I’m sure the audience is gonna be really excited to hear what you have to say.

B.J. Slater: Very cool.

Dan Caston: All right, so if you don’t mind, if we could just kind of dig into your story first, I’m sure everyone would be interested to hear how you got started in aviation and just hear your story and introduce yourself, if you don’t mind.

B.J. Slater: Sure. Yeah, my name is B.J. Slater. I am a flight instructor out in the Chicago area. I’ve been instructing since 2001 and actively instructing off and on and had a few other flying gigs in between there as well. I started out in aviation back in college. I went to a university that had a collegiate flight training program. I didn’t go there for that purpose. I went to study engineering and then after a couple years, decided that wasn’t for me, and so I jumped ship and went to the aviation program and basically learned to fly, got all my certificates and ratings and became a flight instructor while I was in college.

B.J. Slater: Before that, even, I’d always wanted to be a pilot ever since I was a kid and was playing with Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 back in like the late or early ’90s on my dad’s office computer. All it had was a keyboard as my flight controls. I didn’t have a joystick or a yoke or anything, so that’s kind of where I started to get interested with it, was when I was a kid. I’ve always wanted to learn how to fly, and then through middle school, high school, I would take a couple airplane rides or sort of introductory flight lessons, not really realizing that they could’ve been counted as flight lessons. I would just go sign up to do a quick half hour flight around the area, and enjoyed that and then didn’t really get serious about the flight training until I got to college.

Dan Caston: Okay, nice. So, you were flying a flight sim back in the day?

B.J. Slater: Oh yeah, way back when. I was pretty active with it too, although up until … Well, pretty much all through my childhood years as new flight sims would come out, I’d get the latest version and eventually added a yoke and other stuff to it, but yeah.

That was a big part of growing up for me.

Dan Caston: Okay. So you’re flying quite a bit nowadays?

B.J. Slater: Not as much nowadays. After college I went and I did some flying in Alaska and then flew for a Part 135 cargo operator out on the West Coast, flying Cessna Caravans all over the place, which was a great opportunity, a great job. The peak of my flying was back then. Around 2013 or so, I think, is when I left that gig, and actually moved back to Chicago. This is where I grew up, and I joined my family business. So now the family business is my day job and it has nothing to do with aviation, so right now I instruct basically on the side, mostly on the weekends and whatnot, and then I’ve got my blog and website as well, but it’s a side gig for me.

Dan Caston: Nice. All right, sounds good. What would say your favorite plane would be if you were to choose over your flight career so far?

B.J. Slater: Oh, I’ve been really, really fortunate to have a couple of amazing airplanes I’ve gotten to fly. Like most people, small airplanes, I probably have more time in a Cessna 172 than just about anything else, but when I was in Alaska I started flying the Cessna Caravan, the Cessna 208, which is the single engine turbo prop, and had a bunch of time in that. Loved that airplane. It’s a fantastic airplane. It does everything you want it to do but it’s so easy to fly, and then while I was in Alaska also, I had the chance to fly in the right seat of a DC-3. I had one summer where I got to fly around in a DC-3 carrying passengers out to fishing lodges and things.

B.J. Slater: That was something I’d always wanted to do but I didn’t realize that I would, you know … I ended up doing it in my late ’20s and I didn’t think I’d get there that fast, but it was a great opportunity. It’s some great memories, so those two and probably tied for my favorites.

Dan Caston: That’s kind of a cool experience.

B.J. Slater: Oh yeah, it was awesome. I wish I could take credit for having decided that’s what I was gonna go do, but it was really just kind of being in the right place at the right time and taking a chance, which paid off.

Dan Caston: Do you think there’d be any time that you would’ve … If you had a flight sim, it would’ve helped you in your flight training at all?

B.J. Slater: Yeah. I remember when I was working on my instrument rating, we did a lot of stuff with what at the time was called a personal computer aviation training device, a PCAT, we called it. They’ve changed the names of the different types of computer based sims quite a bit, but at the time it was basically like a fancy set of flight controls and some switches and things that you could manipulate that … but it was basically … It was something like X-Plane or similar to X-Plane, where you were basically just flying around in a flight sim, but it had the yoke and the rudder pedals and it was fairly heavy duty and whatnot.

B.J. Slater: So, that was something I used in training. My flight school had one, and then there were times where at home I have my little home yoke, my laptop and whatnot, and I’d set it up. I did practice, especially with instrument flying. I did a lot of instrument practice with a flight sim and even the ones at home, even though the time wasn’t loggable, it was something that definitely helped me. It definitely helped me practice the procedures and practice the approaches and get my instrument scan down and do all those things for me. Any kind of practice you can do with that is helpful and flight sim was a great one for that.

Dan Caston: Right.

B.J. Slater: I’m trying to think. More recently I did an instrument proficiency check because I had been out of flying for a couple years. I got back into it and I wanted to get instrument current again. Before I went up in the actual airplane, I, again, pulled out my laptop and my yoke, which I still have, and set it up and was just basically practicing approaches and practicing things just trying to get the hang of it again. That definitely helped as I went and did the IPC at the … It helped shake some of the rust off.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. So you’ve mainly used it for like IFR training and that kind of thing?

B.J. Slater: Yeah. In the past, that’s what I have used it for, and then when I was flying the Caravan, I actually went to flight safety where they had a full motion flight simulator, like where it’s the whole replica cockpit on the hydraulic jacks and whatnot, so we did that once a year when I was working for that company, which, as much as I would love to have something like that at home, it just wasn’t really practictical, but yeah. In that, we did do instrument training but we also did a whole bunch of other things. Emergencies and other things that were not strictly instrument related, but it was a safer … It was a place where you could practice things that you couldn’t safely do in the airplane.

Dan Caston: Yeah, it would be pretty neat. Is that a pretty neat experience? Does it feel like you’re actually flying around when you’re in one of those?

B.J. Slater: Yeah. It’s really pretty remarkable, what they’re able to do with it. Like things where even as you’re taxiing, you can feel the bump of the seams in the pavement and stuff like that. It’s pretty amazing what they have been able to do with the motion control systems, but it’s also … It’s not quite 100 percent accurate. Especially with landing and whatnot, they get it pretty close but even the best flight simulators, I think, are gonna be just not … Some of the subtle nuances won’t be quite the same, but yeah, it is a really cool experience and it’s a really cool tool because, like I said, you could do a lot of things there that you just couldn’t do in the actual airplane.

Dan Caston: Have you ever noticed that people that fly flight sims are more reliant on their instruments or … Just because I’ve seen that a lot of people seem to be using it for IFR training, but new pilots probably use it for VFR as well, like myself. Have

you ever noticed that people get reliant on their instruments versus looking outside the cockpit?

B.J. Slater: Definitely. I have seen that. I don’t know if that’s something that is due to their use of a flight sim. I think it’s something that all new student pilots go through. The private pilot training that we do is almost all visually based. All the maneuvers are supposed to be done looking outside and using the horizon as a reference and whatnot, and I think that people … Some of it is the instructors and some of it is the students who got these fancy instruments in front of you, especially in the newer airplanes where there are these glass cockpit displays and things, and it’s really hard to ignore those, but it’s … For whatever reason, most people have to go through a … They have to kind of learn where to look outside the airplane and know that if they hold a certain pitch attitude, for example, when they’re climbing away from the airport, that that’ll give them the airspeed that they’re looking for and they don’t have to keep looking at the airspeed indicator all the time.

B.J. Slater: It’s just so much easier for us to visually see what’s going on outside the airplane and interpret that than it is to be able to see very tiny movements on the attitude indicator. It’s easier to fly by looking outside when the weather’s good and it’s a skill that for whatever reason most new pilots struggle with a little bit, and I think that with flight simulators, it’s possible that could encourage people to look at the instruments because I think flight simulators originally, like back to the original links trainer from the ’30s, that was basically there to help people learn how to fly on instruments, so I think that there’s kind of that idea that that’s what simulators have traditionally been for.

B.J. Slater: Also, when you’re looking at a computer monitor, for example, you don’t quite get the same visual field representation that you would if you were in the actual airplane, which is one of the cool things about virtual reality, so I think it may give people a more realistic sense of what it’s like to actually be in the airplane, which is cool.

Dan Caston: Yeah, that’s what I’ve noticed. It’s when you have the goggles on there, you have a little bit of peripheral but you don’t have complete peripheral. I think they’re working on getting better headsets for that, but yeah, when I went from the monitor to the headset, there was a … It was pretty amazing, actually, to see the difference and you almost felt the movement of the plane. I don’t know if it’s just because it tricks your eyes into making your body feel like you’re moving, but you do something crazy in the plane, you actually feel your stomach kind of drop a little bit, so it’s kind of a unique feeling. I guess that’s a problem for some people because they kind of get motion sickness, but …

B.J. Slater: It could be, yeah. The full flight simulator is the ones that I’ve been in with the hydraulics and whatnot. They kind of work in a similar fashion. Sometimes when you start to start a maneuver or something like that, the simulator will begin to move. It’ll create the sense of motion in that direction, but then it actually tapers off and it’s the visuals that make you feel like that movement is continuing, so they

almost rely on that kind of sensory trick to … They start a motion so that you feel like it’s happening and then the visuals continue that feeling and your brain just kind of links the two, or in some cases doesn’t link them very well, which is … You know, people can get motion sickness on full flight simulators also, for kind of the same reasons.

Dan Caston: Yeah. I’ve found it seems like a lot of people have no issue with it, but there are the select few that have some gut issues and I’ve heard from them, yeah, they have some issues regards to it. I’ve heard a lot of that’s to do with how fast your display is producing the image, so if it’s slow and kind of jerky, then I guess you get more motion sickness.

B.J. Slater: I could see that, yeah.

Dan Caston: Yeah. So, going back to kind of more flight training, where do you see most students fail in a way? Where do they not fail, but where do they struggle the most when it comes to flying?

B.J. Slater: Well, one of the easiest answers to that is with landing an airplane and learning to do the landing flare and whatnot, and the reason that that’s a struggle for people is because it’s really hard to do. It’s hard to do well. You have to basically, or the way I describe it to people is you’re basically controlling this big one ton piece of metal that’s flying through the air at 60 miles an hour or so and you’re trying to guide it down above the pavement and you’re trying to control the height of this thing within the matter of a few inches or a foot or two. That kind of precise control is not something that you just are born with. You have to kind of learn that over time.

B.J. Slater: So people struggle with that because I think it is one, it’s a difficult skill to learn, and two, for as many landings as we try to do, you actually don’t get a lot of time where you can spend in a landing flare. Each landing is a fairly brief event, so you just don’t get as much time in that kind of space where you’re judging your height above the ground and you’re timing how quickly you’re bringing the nose up and slowing the airplane down. It’s difficult because there’s a lot of stuff to learn, a lot of skills to learn and you just don’t get to spend a lot of time there. Even doing touch-and-gos, each landing is only at most like 20, 30 seconds out of the whole trip around the traffic pattern.

Dan Caston: Right. Is there any way to kind of practice that outside of landing? Like for example, like slow flight or something like that? Or would that be kind of a separate skill?

B.J. Slater: So, the cool thing with slow flight and all the other maneuvers, ground reference maneuvers and stalls and all those things is that they kind of form the basis of a lot of the skills that lead up to landings. So, we kind of introduce a whole bunch of different maneuvers first before progressing to the traffic pattern and practicing landings. All of those maneuvers serve some function. Ground reference maneuvers help you learn how to control the ground track of the airplane in a cross wind and how to turn so that you can line up with the runway

and how to adjust for wind drift on final, those sorts of things.

B.J. Slater: Slow flight and stalls help you get used to flying the airplane on the back side of the power curve, which is where the slower you go, the more power you need to maintain an altitude and an airspeed. When you’re in a landing flare, basically what you’re trying to do in a simplified way is you’re allowing the airplane to decelerate while you’re trying to hold altitude, which is more or less what the entry to slow flight is or what the entry to a stall might be, is you’re just allowing the airplane to bleed off airspeed as you increase its pitch at a rate where you’re able to do that without increasing altitude and you’re sort of timing it so the airplane touches down right.

B.J. Slater: So all those things help build the foundation of the skills needed for landings, and then there’s a few other things that you can do that sort of … You could do a high speed taxi down the runway where you’re holding the nose off and that helps you kind of get a sense for what that site picture looks like, where you’re just on the main wheels and the nose is up and you can see that nose high landing attitude that you would normally see. There’s other methods where you can start a takeoff and then just as the airplane becomes airborne you reduce power and allow the airplane to settle back into a flare again, so there’s ways of kind of stretching that window out where you can spend more time in the flare and more time experiencing that regime of flight.

B.J. Slater: Slow flight, stalls and things all help with that but there’s other things you can actually do on the runway too that are helpful. One of the cool things with VR, I’m hoping, is that that’ll give people more time to kind of get a sense for what that looks like and they can … Any flight simulator, it’s really cool because if you want to practice a landing, well, you can just go back and do the final approach to landing over and over and over again. You don’t have to fly around the whole traffic pattern first. You can just kind of reset the position. I think that can be helpful too.

Dan Caston: Right, for sure. Yeah, I was just about to ask about … Yeah, if VR flight would actually … If that was something you could actually practice in VR flight or is that something better left at the cockpit? But it sounds like you kind of answered that.

B.J. Slater: Yeah, I think that a lot of it’s gonna depend on the quality of the simulation, but I think that as the technology improves and as … There’s already really good flight models. Like I know X-Plane has some really great … Their Cessna 172 is a pretty darn good 172 and you can … There’s a version of their software that is used in actual FAA approved flight training devices. So, I think that part’s good. It’s just the visuals are hard. Like I said earlier, even in the really high end pull motion simulators, the landings are always … they’re not quite like the real airplane but they’re close enough where I think that you could benefit a lot from having that time in there.

Dan Caston: Right, that makes sense. So, what kind of plane would you … If you were a flight student,

I guess … Is the Cessna 172, is that the main one you’d use for flying or would there be any other ones? I know you can get pretty much any plane … Well, maybe not any plane out there, but you can get a lot of planes on X-Plane and …

B.J. Slater: Yeah.

Dan Caston: Would there be any other ones that you would use for training?

B.J. Slater: If this was a person who was actually going through flight training and they knew what kind of airplane they were flying, what the actual physical airplane that they were flying was, I would try to get something as close to that as possible, so if they’re flying a Cessna 172 and they can do that in X-Plane, that’s great. If they’re flying a Piper Warrior even though they’re really similar, I would try to get an airplane that matches what they’re flying in their actual training. Otherwise, something like a Cessna, they’re so ubiquitous. They’re all over the place and most pilots, even if that’s not the airplane they train in, they’ll eventually come across a Cessna 172.

B.J. Slater: Other airplanes, like there’s a lot of Cirruses or Cirri, I’m not sure what the plural of Cirrus is, but the Cirrus airplanes have become really common in training fleets. They’re quite popular too. So, anything that’s similar to what you’re training in, I think is the best way to go or similar to what you think you might train in someday.

Dan Caston: Okay. Sounds good. If you were to focus most of your time on one particular portion of flight training on a flight sim, where would you kind of focus at? Would it be on the landings or would you maybe focus on a different portion of your flying? I guess maybe it depends on the person, but in general for most of the students, what would you kind of say they should focus on when they’re using their flight sims for training? I know you can actually use radio comms and there’s different ways to actually set up with the ATCs so you can have a live person on the other end and stuff like that as well, but just as an idea, but where would you focus if you were a flight student?

B.J. Slater: If I was a flight student going through training, what I would try to do is, and I’ve actually had students who’ve done something similar to this both with flight simulators and also just with sitting at home in a chair with a checklist and whatnot, but I would … At home is a great place to practice all the things that you would do in flight and kind of drill them until they become natural or almost automatic. So, from running checklists or practicing maneuvers and all the procedures that go through a maneuver … Like with slow flight, the entry to slow flight, I just did a video on my site about slow flight and the entry to it, or the whole maneuver, but, like, the entry is …

B.J. Slater: There’s a bunch of different steps that you have to do from making sure you’re at the right altitude, doing your clearing turns, using [carpy 00:24:49], reducing power, holding the nose up as the airplane slows down and then adding the flaps and

all these different things, and practicing those procedures, practicing those things til they become second nature, really helps out when you go do it in the real airplane, because the real airplane is really expensive and it’s … Because of that, anything you can practice on the ground will really help you out when you’re doing the flight training in the big airplane.

B.J. Slater: So, things like that, and what I’m interested to see and I’m interested to try this with some students of mine or just kind of hear about people who have done it is just see if you can sort of just follow the same syllabus that you’re doing in your flight training and just practice those things at home and just sort of use that as your … Use your home simulator as your laboratory to drill all the procedures, to drill all the checklists and the memory items and all those things. Make all your mistakes there and try to be as well prepared as you can be before your next flight lesson.

B.J. Slater: I think you could save quite a bit of time and money doing it that way and actually end up as a more proficient pilot in the end because for all these things, it takes practice, and that’s … In the airplane, that’s an expensive proposition but whether you’re at home and you have a flight simulator or even if you’re just running checklists on your couch or practicing radio communications, whether it’s through one of the apps like what you mentioned or just with your cat, which they’re not terribly conversational but, you know, any time you can practice radio communications …

B.J. Slater: Actually, a really good example, it just takes some practice because you just have to know what to say and how to say it and the more often you do it, the better off you are. So, anything like that, I think can be useful, but as a caveat to that, I would say make sure that you’re practicing something specific. This is something that I’m guilty of, is that sometimes I’ll get on a flight simulator. I just like to fly around, because it’s fun to do and it’s like flying. You want to look around and do fun things, but for training purposes, it’s really important to have a specific plan in mind and have a specific objective for what you’re trying to practice that particular session. That is, I think, how you get the most mileage out of it.

Dan Caston: Right. Yeah, I guess you could even go as far as planning your flight out before. Like doing a little mini-cross country or something to that effect. Would that make sense to do? Like have it planned out in SkyVector or on a chart and go through that as well?

B.J. Slater: Yeah, I think that’s a great idea actually. I hadn’t really thought about the cross country part of it, but yeah, doing the planning, doing the exercises … I know you can load pretty realistic, up to date weather in the sims and whatnot. I think that’s excellent because there’s a lot of things that you could do, a lot of procedures for cross country flying and for navigating, radio navigation, things like that, GPA navigation. Yeah, I think sims would be outstanding for that.

Dan Caston: If you had to choose one flight control, because a lot of people can’t afford to buy all

their controls at once, the yoke, the rudder pedals and … In VR you don’t really need all the switches and that, but I guess a trim wheel is helpful. That’s kind of what I run with right now, but what would you recommend as kind of the number one piece of equipment you’d start with?

B.J. Slater: To start with, I’d start with the yoke. That’s actually what I have. I have, I think, a CH Products yoke from unknown years ago, but it’s got the throttle and the propeller and mixture control and all that stuff right on the top of it, but it’s having that … You know, being able to turn it and move it the way you would in an actual airplane, I think, is the biggest thing, and then after the yoke, I would get rudder pedals. That’s the other thing that I would want, and I don’t have them, but I hope to get some soon.

Dan Caston: Right. Okay, sounds good. So, just kind of going back to if you were just about to take a flight, and there’s actually some aircraft in X-Plane, aftermarket ones you’d have to buy, but you can actually do a walk around the plane … What are some of the things or maybe one of the big things that someone would miss doing a walk around or something someone should remember when they’re kind of starting to plan and getting ready?

B.J. Slater: Well, there’s always something that can be missed and one of the things I like to challenge people is to, every time you do a pre-flight, try to find something new that you haven’t really looked at before and just sort of … Inside the engine cowling is always a good spot because there’s always some … You’re like, “Oh, wait. Yeah, that’s the vacuum pump. I forgot what that looks like,” or, “Oh, that’s the P-lead for the magneto” and just different things that you should look at each time if they’re accessible, if they’re things that you can see, but a lot of times we may not notice them, or we might … If the vacuum pump doesn’t work, for example, we’ll notice that during the run up and there’s other checks that we do, but I always like to encourage people to try and find something new each time.

B.J. Slater: Other things like common things that get missed that could cause trouble or at least be somewhat embarrassing … It’s not uncommon for people to leave the chocks in. They do the pre-flight and they get in the airplane and they never pulled the chocks and so they start up and try to taxi and their airplane doesn’t go anywhere, and so then you have to shut down and get out and then that’s when everyone at the airport’s looking at you. Not that I would know what that’s like.

Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly, never seen that.

B.J. Slater: The same thing with tie downs, and then slightly more concerning are cowl plugs or pitot tube covers, which that actually can, especially if you flying instruments, that can become quite dangerous if you don’t remove those.

Dan Caston: Right.

B.J. Slater: People who … Just kind of a random list of things I’ve seen people do, people who test

the pitot heat on the … They turn on the pitot heat to see if it’s working and then they go out and they grab the pitot tube, which gets really, really hot. You know, you can feel around it to see if there’s heat, but if you feel heat, you don’t want to touch it.

Dan Caston: I guess that’s one of the things you might not realize until you’re doing a pre-flight on a real plane versus the aircraft because you’re not gonna grab …

B.J. Slater: Yeah, that’d be hard to simulate I guess.

Dan Caston: Yeah.

B.J. Slater: Then like, you know, clogged static ports, inspection panels that aren’t secured right, anything … After an airplane comes out of maintenance, there’s all kinds of things that are possible. They’re rare. I mean, I’ve actually rarely seen a problem with an airplane that comes out of maintenance, but you know that that’s a time when all the inspection panels have been opened and everything’s been removed and everyone’s been looking at things. Tools have been in and out, so you want to look for any possible things that might have gotten left behind or things that didn’t get secured properly and that sort of thing.

B.J. Slater: Most commonly, there’s … You know, like cowl plugs or control locks, things like that. Things stuck in pitot tubes or static ports, tape over a static port, especially if it’s just had a static system check or something like that, and then the big items like fuel. Like visually verifying how much fuel you actually have regardless of what the gauges say. Actually going in and looking. That’s an important one.

Dan Caston: Yeah, I bet. All right. I’ve got one more thing here before we kind of start wrapping it up. What are your thoughts on emergencies and practicing those on sims? That was one thing I thought of that would be … I thought could work in a sim but I just wanted to get your thoughts on …

B.J. Slater: I think it’s a great idea. I think that’s also one where it’s important to have a sim that’s similar to the airplane that you’re doing flight training in if you’re actually, actively flight training at the time, but the reason that it’s important … A couple of things. One, when we practice, for example, emergency off airport landings in the actual airplane, we don’t actually land. We don’t land in a field. We don’t land … We typically get down to, depending on the area, about 500 feet above the ground and then we have to execute a go around because we don’t want to go lower than that. We’re looking for obstructions and things.

B.J. Slater: That actually limits the amount of time that the student has to perform all the procedures, because there’s things, like for forest landing where you would normally typically unlatch the door and pop it open to make sure you can open the door after landing and a couple of other things that often times students run out of time to do all these things before they get to the 500 feet where they have to do the go around, so in a sim, you could actually practice going all the way down and landing in a field, is kind of cool.

B.J. Slater: The other thing is, is that emergencies are one of the few procedures, or one of the few things you do in airplanes where you’re expected to do at least a certain portion of it from memory. We use checklists for almost everything and we rely on the checklist rather than our memory because the checklist doesn’t forget, but in emergencies, there’s a lot of quick action items that we do expect people to recall from memory. Trying those at home on a sim or even in front of a cockpit poster, like an instrument panel poster or something like that, and actually running through those things at home, you kind of have to commit some of those to memory.

B.J. Slater: Then you pull out the checklist and you run through the same items, make sure they’re done and then you go on from there, but emergencies, because of the fact that there’s these memory items and because, again, a lot of things that you would do in a sim, you can’t safely do in the actual airplane. I think there is a great benefit to that. You can do other things that are … You can simulate certain emergencies that are hard to simulate in a real airplane. You can simulate an engine fire or a cabin fire, cabin smoke in a sense. You can simulate severe icing conditions or other things that would be difficult to simulate or dangerous to simulate in the real airplane.

Dan Caston: Right, yeah, you can set all those up and you can actually set them up on a timer, too, so you don’t know when it’s gonna happen. You could do a cross country flight from one airport to another and have it set on a random time to go off. That’s kind of why I was thinking it’s a pretty neat tool.

B.J. Slater: Another common one that sims are … I think sims are actually better at this than the real airplane is simulating an instrument failure, like a vacuum system failure, because if your vacuum pump goes out and you don’t notice it, then your attitude indicator or any of the instruments that run on the vacuum system, they’re going to fail, but they’re gonna fail slowly. You’re not gonna notice it right away because as the gyroscope spins down, eventually it’s gonna start … The attitude indicator will start to lean one direction.

B.J. Slater: Figuring out that that’s what it’s doing and figuring out that that’s wrong and you have to use other instruments, that’s the hard part, whereas in the real airplane, you know, because we can’t just fail the vacuum system in a real airplane easily, what we typically do is the instructors will cover it with a post-it note or they’ll cover up the instrument and say, “Okay, this instrument has failed.” So, that still trains the pilot to be able to fly without that instrument, so we get that part done, but actually seeing what it looks like as it’s failing, slowly, that’s tricky, and that’s hard to do in a real airplane, so that’s something where, yeah, you could set that up to fail on a timer or randomly.

B.J. Slater: Then when you see it happen, you’re like, “Oh, I could see why that would be tricky.” You could follow that right into the ground and start wondering, “Why is the airspeed increasing? Why is all this other stuff happening?” You have to kind of … That’s why we do the instrument scan. You keep looking at all the other

instruments and you see … If one of these instruments doesn’t agree, you have to have that presence of mind to say, “That instrument’s wrong.” That’s actually something you can do better in a sim, I think, than you do in the actual airplane.

Dan Caston: Right. Yeah. That’s a good point. All right, so, last one here. I’ll just go over here. What would be your number one tip for anyone that’s going through flight training or even getting another rating or something like that? What would be your number one tip? It doesn’t have to be flight sim related, just in general. Through your experience, what would be your tip for anyone doing flight training?

B.J. Slater: My number one tip is to be an active participant in the training, and what I mean by that is to … Don’t just wait for your flight instructor to ask you to do something or don’t show up for your lesson and then learn everything and then go home and not think about it again, but, you know, try to learn as much as you can, read as much as you can on your own, hang around the airport and talk to people and try things out at home. Practice things at home. Drill memory items. Do these things, like treat learning to fly like you’re training for anything else or like you’re preparing for anything else important where you’re always doing a little bit every day, and that might almost be if I could have a piece of advice one A or [inaudible 00:40:06] that would be it.

B.J. Slater: It’s probably do a little bit every day, because sometimes people only fly once a week, or sometimes less. You may fly once a week but then one of the weeks you get weathered out, so it’s important to kind of keep yourself active and going in between the lessons too, but be active. Don’t just wait for your next flight lesson. Always be learning something and that’ll really help you out in the long run. Plus, if you become a professional pilot, that’s gonna be what you’re expected to do anyway.