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17.    FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR'S MANUAL

experienced to be capable of judging properly the correct or desirable standards.  The standards of the instructor should be maintained to a high minimum and his students inspired to excel them. 

The student should be his own severest critic and, in his struggles to achieve the standards he has been inspired to set for himself, he will gain a high degree of proficiency.  Too often students assert that they have no difficulties while solo.  If such an assertion were true, one of two things would also be true; either nothing was attempted or the students is too easily satisfied. 

Few students will of their own volition compare flying with anything familiar to their normal habits or accomplishments.  The instructor should make frequent use of such comparisons, where pertinent, to eliminate the feeling of strangeness and to develop the student's faculties of correlating experiences.  Too frequently such students see no relation between previous maneuvers and new ones which are simply a combination of ones previously perfected and an extension of the principles involved.

FAMILIARIZATION WITH THE AIRPLANE

When as much of the foregoing has been discussed as is likely to be of value to the particular student, he should be taken to the airplane which will be used for his flight training and the names of the principal parts of the aircraft and their functions should be explained.  He should have the action of the control surfaces explained until he has a clear conception of why, as well as how, they work.  When all the external parts of the aircraft have been explained and their functions thoroughly understood, the student should be seated in the pilot's cockpit and instructed how to make himself comfortable.  Comfort in the cockpit is one of the prerequisites to piloting efficiency and is particularly important to a student.

When he is comfortably seated, the first important lesson should be given and the student impressed that this procedure is to be followed religiously throughout his flying career: The safety belt is to be adjusted to a comfortably snug fit and fastened.  This should become automatic immediately on being seated in a pilot's cockpit, even though the engine is only to be run up with the wheels chocked.

There have been many instances where occupants of aircraft have been severely injured while merely seated in an aircraft on the line with the engine stopped.  They have been thrown out when the craft was upset by whirlwinds, such as may be seen on a hot day, sudden violent gusts of wind preceding a thunderstorm, heavy prop blasts from large ships, and being taxiied into by other aircraft.  The early formation of this habit is a precaution that cannot be overemphasized. 

When this has been explained and the belt fastened, the instruments should be named, their purposes and actions explained, and the limits to be observed in their indications pointed out.  The importance of the messages of these instruments should be stressed and the necessity for frequent reference to them explained.  However, the student should be relieved of this responsibility for the first few hours of flight training, the instructor making it clear that he will do this for him until he has progressed to the proper point in his training where they will become one of his additional duties.