Flying requires skills in at least four fields: precise aircraft control – preparation and navigation – communication – decision making.

One could argue endlessly about priorities (read more on that here) and what is more important. Landing properly is fine, but doing it at the worng place because of poor navigation is not exactly brilliant. Knowing your exact position is cool, but if you can’t maintain a stable altitude, your passengers won’t get impressed. Flying a perfect loop overhead an airport won’t impress the tower controller as much as your bad undestanding of the “Negative” word… Endless…

In this respect, pilots are like personal computers. You know, these boxes with CPU, hard disk, memory and video board. Buying one is always a dilemma: where to invest ? More memory ? Faster CPU ? Bigger hard disk ? Bleeding edge video board ?

There are two smart ways out. If you have high budget, buy yourself the best of everything. In flying this would mean many training to perfect bring all your skills to top level. Otherwise, make a good trade-off. Don’t put all your money in a good CPU and then buy crap memory, slow hard disk and 2 square pixels video board.

Evaluate yourself in flight, and make self-debriefings. Be fair about yourself, note what went good and what went wrong. Next time airborne try to improve what went wrong the last time, and evaluate again. Give yourself good and bad points over time to know which skills needs improvement. Evaluate your evolution over time, and you’ll get a picture of your strengths and weaknesses.

Three times “Evaluate” in a paragraph… excellent use of English But… stop ! May be this is the most important flying skill ever: self-evaluation ! Annual control flight with an instructor is good, but it won’t help to stop your skills to degrade if you don’t self-evaluate and self-improve where needed.

A long long time ago, I flew with a fellow pilot in the right-hand seat. After the flight he make some observations, and a couple of good points. But I got shocked when he refused to fly with me in the right-hand seat. He told me he never flew with another pilot (except his instructor), and was not sure he wanted to do so. Nothing personal against me, but he did not wanted to be subject of someone else’s judgement.

I never asked him again, but I still wonder if he’s simply a bit shy, or if he has serious doubts about his skills, but wants to continue flying anyway. Or may be I’m looking sooo scary…