Does being a pilot give you any kind of edge?

[tombuch 0]

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On final while going straight down towards the trees, she said she kept reaching for the throttle for more power but didn't get any.

I'll give you a different pilot perspective story.

Several years ago I was landing my Sabre 120 with the beginning stages of a head cold that I hadn't yet identified. I did my standard aggressive 180 front riser turn with a small straight in component at the end. As I came out of the turn into the front riser dive my head told me that I was still turning hard, and my hand twitched to pull down aggressively to stop the phantom turn. My pilot training told me my hands (controls) were neutral, and that I might simply be experiencing vertigo. OH CRAP! WHAT SHOULD I DO! Reluctantly I held my controls where I thought they should be in spite of all the internal information telling me I was in a deep spiral and about to die. I bit my lip, preped for a nasty slide landing, and hoped I had made the right decision. I had. Years of instrument training and time in an Air Force spacial disorientation class is really what saved my life that day.

As the day wore on the head cold slammed me hard, but when I got in the airplane there hadn't been a trace.

So after I landed I thought back to friends who had made foolish last minute corrections for no apparent reason and didn't live to explain why. And I was glad for all the money I had spent on my pilot training.

Tom Buchanan
Instructor Emeritus
Comm Pilot MSEL,G
Author: JUMP! Skydiving Made Fun and Easy

[Beerlight 0]

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A friend at the DZ is an Air Force Pilot that pilots C-141s.

You mean she "used" to fly C-141's, right?

[Beerlight 0]

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BTW, I currently fly a 1965 V-tail Bonanza (Dr killer, but still a great plane) and 1947 Cessna 120. Also, the Citation X and the F-16.

Ah, rough life your leading there ViperDriver.....

[JohanW 0]

John, I highly respect your credentials, even though in your online persona you occasionally get on a high horse and exhibit a somewhat limited and possibly slanted view of others, their opinions and the values of those opinions. What I was trying to do was tell him that I think it is important to keep in mind there is more to learning to skydive and parachute than theory from a different, though neighbouring, universe, while not dismissing carry-over from his previous experiences.

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***The best student is a student, not someone who has a head start in theoretical knowledge, but someone able to be taught.

So what would you say to a potential skydiver who happened to be, say, a physics or engineering professor? "Go away, you'll never learn"?Non sequitur. Your teaching others does not disqualify you as a student. But you will be at the other side of the lectern, and the mindset should be different on different sides of it. So you might disqualify yourself from being the best student you could possibly be. By, say, positioning yourself as a highly qualified theorist (is that a word?) from a different field who should be treated specially because of that. You may rate special treatment; someone else whose credentials I highly respect has alluded to that, but not because of academic high standing, and not with regard to all aspects of a first jump course because of prior theoretical, mental and physical skills and knowledge. But you will have to acquire certain new skills and certain new knowledge, and you will need to have the mindset to learn those things. You will have to be a student again. For a teacher, this may require mental flexibility. This mental flexibility is not a given in any person, be they a professor, a pilot or a construction worker.

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***Come back after your AFF and tell us a) how much fun it was and b) how being a pilot helped you and your instructors. And c) where it did not help. We learn from that, too!

I didn't find ANYTHING about being a pilot to be unhelpful in my student training.Pars pro toto. Without discounting your experience, I would like to go beyond n=1 experiments. If his experience should be different, we might learn from it, don't you think? The subject is muddied a bit because prior piloting knowledge might have one effect and average pilot character might have another. Your position as a pilot and a professor and a skydiver makes you a more difficult case than your character already does on its own. Meanwhile, I have to try to keep my sanity, my humour and the remnant of my dignity while opposing the view of a professor on the subject of teaching, where absolutes are few and far between and your experience is (a lot) greater than mine, while being limited to the written word with the occasional smiley.

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Do you agree with his statement: "The best student is a student, not someone who has a head start in theoretical knowledge, but someone able to be taught."

That statement was not intended to be taken as an absolute. I hoped it would convey that if you need to learn new things it does not matter where you're coming from if you're not moving towards where you need to go. I dare you to disagree with that.

You are free to take another soundbite from my post and run it into the ground, I can't stop you and I wouldn't want to. But shaking another blunt axe at parts of a post without any of the subtleties and nuances of the original left in it is quite the conversation-stopper with me. That's not a dialogue, it's not even a rant, it's a flame. Please prove me wrong. You have untold riches of experience as a teacher; please give me the opportunity to learn from you. Or not. But let me swim to drown or reach the shore then. Don't push me under.

Johan.
I am. I think.

[tempretired 0]

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A friend at the DZ is an Air Force Pilot that pilots C-141s.

You mean she "used" to fly C-141's, right?

You're correct. Looks like they retired them in 2006 and started using the C-17 (the internet is wonderful). The last time I spoke with her was back in 1999. Actually, she was on the skydive that I had my last malfunction on. I'm not sure where she is now.

[cutter29 0]

being a pilot helped me a lot. some things carry over some do not.
remember all the stupid stuff your students do that make you shake your head and wonder.... you just became that guy again. keep an open mind and you will be fine.

[kallend 1,623]

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What I was trying to do was tell him that I think it is important to keep in mind there is more to learning to skydive and parachute than theory from a different, though neighbouring, universe, while not dismissing carry-over from his previous experiences.

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***The best student is a student, not someone who has a head start in theoretical knowledge, but someone able to be taught.

So what would you say to a potential skydiver who happened to be, say, a physics or engineering professor? "Go away, you'll never learn"?Non sequitur. Your teaching others does not disqualify you as a student. But you will be at the other side of the lectern, and the mindset should be different on different sides of it. .

You got the wrong end of the question. The question related to theoretical knowledge possessed by the professional - not to his/her experience as a teacher. You basically badmouthed theoretical knowledge.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[JohanW 0]

You described the professional as a professor. To the best of my knowledge, a professor teaches. So I misread you.

I did not intend to badmouth theoretical knowledge either; if you read that into it you may have misread me, or I may have misformulated. As I tried again to explain earlier, I intended to convey the fact you are moving is more important than your starting position if you want to get somewhere. I provided anecdotal evidence from my own experience why I thought this might be a useful point to make. Another teacher's post in this thread specifically said she experienced this same challenge personally. (Thanks Pat. You are not alone. And therefore neither am I.)

To continue the badmouthing of theoretical knowledge , there is more to skydiving and parachuting than theory. On the other hand, I think a pilot brings along more possibly useful things than theoretical knowledge alone, even if I didn't explicitly say that in the soundbite you love to hate to quote. But it's easy to get ahead of yourself because of perceived knowledge, ability or experience. Pilots are not the only kind of people at risk of this, DZO kids might fall victim to the same fallacy, tunnel rats might think they're the cat's meow. (I said might!) It would be counterproductive not to acknowledge their prior abilities, but it hardly makes them well-rounded skydivers. Any skydiver needs a lot more than theoretical knowledge.

Johan.
I am. I think.

[kallend 1,623]

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You described the professional as a professor. To the best of my knowledge, a professor teaches. So I misread you.

I did not intend to badmouth theoretical knowledge either; if you read that into it you may have misread me, or I may have misformulated. As I tried again to explain earlier, I intended to convey the fact you are moving is more important than your starting position if you want to get somewhere. I provided anecdotal evidence from my own experience why I thought this might be a useful point to make. Another teacher's post in this thread specifically said she experienced this same challenge personally. (Thanks Pat. You are not alone. And therefore neither am I.)

To continue the badmouthing of theoretical knowledge , there is more to skydiving and parachuting than theory. On the other hand, I think a pilot brings along more possibly useful things than theoretical knowledge alone, even if I didn't explicitly say that in the soundbite you love to hate to quote. But it's easy to get ahead of yourself because of perceived knowledge, ability or experience. Pilots are not the only kind of people at risk of this, DZO kids might fall victim to the same fallacy, tunnel rats might think they're the cat's meow. (I said might!) It would be counterproductive not to acknowledge their prior abilities, but it hardly makes them well-rounded skydivers. Any skydiver needs a lot more than theoretical knowledge.

Do you have any actual evidence that people with a professional, engineering level of knowledge of aeronautics, on average make worse students than anyone else?

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[AFFI 0]

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Do you have any actual evidence that people with a professional, engineering level of knowledge of aeronautics, on average make worse students than anyone else?

I do not believe that any individual from a specific profession will automatically classify them to be grouped as “challenging” students. I believe that the quality of a student rests on the attitude of the trainee, not the nature of that persons professional background.

Learning/Teaching how to skydive is a 2 person job and neither carries more mental burden than the other. Each role has its challenges and it is incumbent upon the instructor to adapt to the varying personalities they work with. I have worked with pilots and according upon the attitude of the student makes them a certain type of student – good or challenging…

Mykel AFF-I10
Skydiving Priorities: 1) Open Canopy. 2) Land Safely. 3) Don’t hurt anyone. 4) Repeat…

[JohanW 0]

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Do you have any actual evidence that people with a professional, engineering level of knowledge of aeronautics, on average make worse students than anyone else?

No.

And I never said they do.

Johan.
I am. I think.

[mt_skydiver 0]

So on another note of this thread, I found it interesting that becoming a skydiver first and then a pilot 3 years later I found transitioning to the pilot role was much easier than others have found. My first dozen landings were greasers and my flight instructor thought that I must have done some flying before. When we sat down and thought about it months later we attributed at least some of my good fortune in learning the skills of flying so fast must have come from skydiving! In the example of landing my first time in an airplane I can definitely say that the skills of learning when/where to flare and the visual cues you use while piloting a canopy surely attributed to learning to fly and land an aircraft. I would say that this probably goes both ways and while both piloting an aircraft and canopy are different experiences, they share enough similarities to make cross-training just that much easier!

You'll never find me Jew gold!