Pilot's Discretion Podcast, episode 94
The legendary T-38 Talon has been the aerial classroom for generations of Air Force pilots, and Matt Johnson spent many hours teaching there. He shares what he learned from that time, including the benefits of standardization, the importance of pre-flight briefings, and when to let a student make a mistake. These days Matt flies a Citation and a Lancair IVP, so he talks about applying those Air Force lessons to GA operations, and some mistakes he’s made along the way. In the Ready to Copy segment, you’ll learn how to give a good discovery flight, what SR-71 pilots called the airplane, and how cold it really is in his hometown of Fargo, North Dakota.
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Quotes:
- What GA flight schools could learn from the military: “They could benefit from the rigidity of the Air Force. They had a very rigid syllabus. You didn’t do this until you did this.”
- Why standardization matters: “Aerodynamics are aerodynamics. Why teach four different ways to do something when one way works and it’s safe?”
- The real value of an instructor: “You have to be able to teach practical things in addition to the syllabus.”
- Why an instructor has to pre-brief with the student: “You can let them make mistakes. But you can’t let them make mistakes if they’re not gonna give you the airplane back.”
- The only way to prevent panic in the cockpit: “I really drilled… the emergency procedures.”
- How a friend memorized emergency procedures: “He got in his car at night and drove around a parking lot at pretty high speed and he tried to rattle them off.”
- Training in the Lancair: “The stall characteristic is roll inverted and die. Nobody even practices stalls in these at all, in any kind of training. You just go near a stall.”
- Learning to be pilot in command: “That PIC mentality—I didn’t get it until I became an instructor pilot in the T-38.”
- The unique design of the Lancair VIP: “If you look at a Cirrus and a Lancair, they’re a similar shape. And that’s what makes it so doggone quick.”
Links:
Matt’s recent article at Aviation Safety
Sporty's Pilot Training+ membership
Learn more:
Listen to every episode of Pilot's Discretion here
Have a question or comment? Email us: podcast@sportys.com
