| August 20, 2003 Last week, I experienced the finest recurrent aviation training in my 18 years of flying. Although I have been fortunate to have very talented instructors previously, Larry York’s focus on ensuring there is a total and systematic understanding of the airplane before cranking an engine, for my money, sets a new standard. Thumbing through the Pilot Operating Handbook, since it was essentially review, always seemed adequate to me before. Larry, however, asked probing questions to detect softness in understanding (that might prove fatal in the wrong circumstance) and, once detected, did a skillful teaching job to bring that understanding fully up to par. His use of a marker board to explain systems and to test the student’s grasp was very effective and left no room to merely slide by. While I have heard airplane systems explained many times before, I have never had an instructor so thoroughly engage me to be sure I had reached the requisite level of “got it.” In the in-flight portion of the training, Larry was highly organized and straight-forward about the drills we did. There were no dangerous surprises that placed the pilot in a hazardous situation or exercises that were hard on the airplane. After observing my normal habits, he suggested a simple management system that reduced both workload and unnecessary variation, particularly in descent and approaches. Moreover, the system can be used in all twins, not just our Baron 58. I have done simulator training in the past. While there is some benefit to “simulating” situations that would be unreasonably dangerous during a real training flight, in general the “simulation”--at least in the Baron mock-up I used-- was unrealistic. The trick was to learn and to manipulate the idiosyncrasies of the machine, not necessarily to manage a real airplane in real flight. At least in this category of airplane, my opinion is that the live training I did with Larry is overall much more beneficial than simulator training. Finally, it is clear that Larry is not just going through the motions. He is truly passionate about rendering a service that could very well save lives. The analogy he used to describe his approach at the very beginning turned out to be very accurate: he sees himself as a dentist looking for cavities and then properly filling them. I had more cavities than I was aware of. They are now properly filled, and my family and I will be safer because of Larry’s skill and care. Needless to say, I would highly recommend using Larry for training and currency needs.
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