A Question about Condor XC Training….

I got this question from a Condor XC ‘student’, and as I started answering it, I thought it would make a great Soaring Cafe post, so here it is:

 

Student’s Question

A question about what you think a reasonable level of “seriousness” would be in conducting training while using Condor.

For me, I’m really trying to get my XC skills up to snuff…I really want to untie the apron strings, fly contests, go long distances…but I have that “voice” in my head filling me with doubts and indecision. Some of it will just take RL flying to go away, some I can address with Condor.

Using Condor then, I have tried to approach it with the relatively same degree of prep and level of “risk taking” that I would in RL…granted in Condor, I definitely “up the ante” vs. what I would do in RL, but to keep the fidelity of the training somewhat close to reality I try to put limits on what I do in Condor so as not to expose myself to a pattern of decision making that could get me injured or killed in RL. I’m seeing some things in some of the online contests and I’m wondering if this is similar to what guys do in RL in a contest…some of the conversations I saw last night such as “I’d never do this in RL” make me wonder if that’s true…or not?

I don’t know if some of my questioning what I’m seeing is because of the baggage I have from all the simulator training I’ve received over my Air Force/Airline career. We approach it in a very serious and regimented manner, and the quickest way to fail a checkride is to pull something “you’d never do in real life” out of your wazoo on one. We try to fly the sim just like we would in RL, and leave the test pilot stuff to the experts! That works 99.9% of the time, Captain Sullenburger being the exception!

Here’s my question, since you’ve walked the “fledgeling flyer” road already and are an ardent proponent of the program…should I maintain that discipline knowing what my goals are? Or, is it just being overly “anal-retentive” with too much ancestor worship going on towards my pro pilot background?

Last night I also learned that the “q” button…was not for me if I want to adhere to my training goals. To me, it turns a realistic simulation exercise into just another fancy video game. I can see the value if you’re conducting training 1 on 1, solo, or in an scenario where repetition is beneficial for a student….but not in a contest type of environment. To me, it encourages the uncalculated “hair on fire, fangs out” risk-taking behavior I want to stay clear of. While the goal might be to give everyone an opportunity to participate, to me it is negative training and led me to an unsatisfying finish…yeah, I did the task…but not without a crutch. I wonder how it affects the other contestants decision making process, knowing they’ve always got an “out”.

 

My Answer:

First, as regards the basic philosophy of never doing anything in a sim that you wouldn’t do in real life; I have actually found the opposite to be true, with one HUGE assumption, and that is, that you get numerous opportunities to screw up in the sim so you can internalize the “odds of success/failure”.  I know this sounds a bit counter-intuitive, so I will try to explain with an example.
One of the most popular ways for soaring pilots (and power pilots for that matter) to kill themselves is via the dreaded low-altitude stall/spin maneuver.  Unfortunately in RL there is no way to realistically practice low altitude stall/spin entries (as the saying goes, an instructor can only successfully demonstrate this maneuver ONCE).  However, in Condor you can practice this any number of times until you can reliably and repeatedly kill yourself via the stall/spin trick, and can thereby more thoroughly understand just what you are up against, and how to recognize an approaching stall/spin scenario in time to do something about it. Moreover, you could determine to your own satisfaction whether the claim that “if you keep the yaw string straight you can never be surprised by a stall/spin” (I used to claim this, but after some recent crashes in Condor I’m not so sure).
Another popular way of killing yourself in RL is approaching a mountain ridge from the lee side at too low of an altitude to clear, hoping against hope to somehow ‘zoom up’ at the end and get over.  Can’t tell you how many times I have tried this in Condor, but I can tell you that my not-so-splendid results have led me to be a much more conservative pilot in dealing with these situations, because I have seen first-hand that the odds are stacked against me.  So, rather than making me a less-safe pilot, doing things in Condor that I wouldn’t do in RL has made me more safe.
I think your USAF sim experiences stem more from a desire to extract every possible ounce of skill training from every second of very expensive sim time, coupled with the need for evaluation criteria than from any objective study of what does or does not make a safer pilot.  If the USAF sims were freely available to all pilots 24/7, who do you think would be the better aviator – the guy who strictly adheres to a syllabus created 10 years ago by a non-flying colonel in charge of training, or the guy that flies the heck out of the sim and winds up with 10 (or even 100) times the stick time as the rest of the group, even if (or maybe because) he/she ‘kills’ themselves on every third flight?  With Condor, you have that 24/7 infinite availability that the USAF can only dream about! ;-)

 

Student’s Response:

Thanks for the thoughts, and I agree with you 100% that the repetitive teaching of something you’d not want to experience or would be too expensive to practice in RL has great value…we do engine out after engine out approaches in our airline training…sudden cabin depressurization? Same thing…Practice it until we get it right in the sim…High speed aborted takeoff followed by an emergency evacuation? Ditto….Complete electrical failure? Wouldn’t want to see it for the first time in the airplane, but I know what works and what doesn’t because I’ve seen it numerous times in the sim.

My question is a bit more nuanced than that, I guess…I think you are absolutely correct in your training approach…when you’re doing it in a “non-jeopardy” environment…when nothings on the line or we’re teaching “stick and rudder” skills, we can (and should) play around a bit with things and see what the consequences of a bad decision are. Absolutely, the guy with 100 bad experiences will know the outcome better than the guy with only 1 or 2!! BUT (and it’s a big but, so CAPS ON on purpose!) I WOULD NEVER PLAY AROUND OR PUSH A SITUATION OUT OF THE ENVELOPE ON A CHECK RIDE OR IN A REAL LIFE EMERGENCY!!! So, I wonder…at what point should we approach Condor training with that same level of seriousness is my question…

So, if I’m doing a self-taught or 1 on 1 lesson with a student on ridge soaring, your point about training for approaching from the lee side over and over and over until the student finally “get’s it” is absolutely correct and valid and a great training tool…when the outcome is binary…you either crash or you don’t…training summaries are easy for the instructor!

Where I’m leery of it is…in soaring, especially in contest flying (b/c that’s one of my “goals”)…because of soaring’s inherent risk…everyday and every flight…is a potential “checkride”…I may play around “what-if’s” when I’m practicing in Condor and do any or all of what you’ve related when it’s training time…but when I “strap on” in MNS, I mentally put myself into the “mindset” of someone about to do the same in RL and so I’m serious about what I’m about to do…because I want that attitude to xfer to my RL flying…staying alive and wanting to keep others alive around me…AND SO, where I’m questioning the efficacy of Condor flying is reinforced by some of what I see in online behavior both by myself and others is…decision-making, reinforced by an “it can’t kill me” attitude coupled with the magic “q” button push. That’s the negative training of which I speak. Does it put me on a decision making path that leads to postponing a decision until it’s too late? Or on a path to either a low save or safe landing out?

Some of what I see makes me wonder if it’s the former and not the latter, and understanding the “Law of Primacy” I don’t want to have to “unlearn” a bad decision making habit I’ve gotten away with in Condor that will kill me in RL. That’s why I’ve decided that, for me, no more “q” buttons when I do a contest. Things I shouldn’t do in a RL contest, I’m not doing in in Condor. If I wouldn’t enter a canyon in RL without knowing first it was a box canyon or not..I shouldn’t do it in Condor either.

That’s the difference I’m talking about…at what point does the “crash test dummy” training end, and my attitude in Condor should morph into a deadly serious approach, factoring all the risks and looking for a safe outcome? For me, the logical spot that point happens in the online contests I participate in..MNS, USNS…that’s as close as I can get in Condor to RL, and I am looking to maximize the the similarity of the thought process between then…and when I strap that beautiful ASW-19 of mine on.

Hope that explained the genesis of why I asked you what I asked…I know it’s wordy, and probably not well-stated, but I thank you for winnowing through it and as always, your wisdom, insight and perspective is much appreciated.

 

And My Response:

Ah, you have very good points, and I’m afraid I really don’t know the answers.  However, what you are saying about putting your head in the right place for ‘serious’ races like Monday Night Soaring (MNS) is actually very close to the way I look at it.  I don’t mind ‘playing around’ on the US Nightly Soaring (USNS) races with Q and every other possible option enabled, but I think of it as ‘playing around’ and not serious soaring.
When I strap on my Ventus 2bx in the MNS races, I have an entirely different attitude about the seriousness of the task.  Of course, MNS and other ‘real’ races don’t enable any (or many) of the bells/whistles, so it is easier to have a good, serious attitude about the race.

It is interesting that you worry about the Condor sim “leading you astray” with respect to seriousness and a good safety attitude with respect to ‘real-life’ competitions, because I have noticed that quite often, real-life competitions cause reasonably smart soaring pilots to do incredibly stupid, even suicidal things in pursuit of a few more points on the scoreboard.   There was a recent Soaring article about a long-ago Sugarbush contest by Dave Nadler, and I swear I could have just changed the dates in the article and it would have been a good description of many contests I went to last year, especially the 15m Nationals at Logan.  At Logan we wound up with 3 heavily damaged gliders and were fortunate to avoid any serious injuries or fatalities.  Every day we had 50 or so glider scraping the rocks on the Logan front range, with towplanes going right through the gaggles because there was nowhere else to go.  Out on course, pilots were acting like the laws of physics didn’t really apply to them and “everything would just work out”.  I went into the Logan contest with the attitude that I wanted to leave the contest with all my body and glider parts in the same order as when I arrived, and I considered myself very fortunate to have achieved that goal; points on the scoreboard were a distant second place to that!  Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I think this ability of contest pilots to ignore reality is in part based on the relatively low experience levels of the typical U.S. contest pilot.  When you think about it, even an active contest pilot rarely goes to more than one or two contests per season, and rarely flies more than about 50hrs/year.  This is actually a ridiculously low activity level, and nowhere near enough to maintain currency, let alone get better.  So, this guy goes to his one contest of the year, and wants to make the most of it.  He sees the other pilots are also all hyped up and (in his mind) “taking chances and getting away with it”, so why shouldn’t he?  After all, he has been around for a while and hasn’t killed himself yet, so obviously whatever he has been doing is working, isn’t it?  Well, actually, NOT!  The guy has been flying locally over very familiar terrain and hasn’t been at all aggressive, and now hasn’t a clue what to do when his long dormant ‘fangs’ make an appearance.  I saw this so many times just last season that I came to the conclusion that contest management MUST take rampant pilot stupidity into account when designing tasks; if there is the remotest possibility that a pilot could get into trouble, someone will find a way to do it, all in pursuit of a few more points.

As is quite evident in all aspects of aviation (or any other semi-risky endeavor for that matter), currency and recent experience matters.  That’s why you airline guys practice so much in the sims – to maintain currency on maneuvers and situations you would (hopefully) never see in practice.  When God forbid the real emergency does happen along, you have the training and psychological/physiological ‘muscle memory’ all set and ready to go – no thinking required.  In the competitive soaring game, very few of our typical contest pilots have ever even thought of the downside possibilities inherent in racing, much less deliberately exposed themselves to those situations and practiced how to respond.  When Plan A doesn’t work out for these folks, there IS NO Plan B, much less Plans C, D, and E.

So, in summary, I don’t think you should worry too much about having Condor ‘play’ attitudes degrade or corrupt the necessary seriousness with which you approach real-life competitive soaring.  I believe that the currency and experience you gain by attempting and failing in Condor more than offsets any lessening of good survival attitudes.  In fact, it has been my personal experience that no matter how ‘arcade-like’ the race in Condor, crashing is still such a psychologically traumatic experience that I find myself avoiding races like that – I would simply rather not put myself in that situation, and I believe it is THAT attitude that is bleeding over into real-life, rather than becoming more blase about the risks.  Moreover, the more time I spend in Condor and the more automatic all the basic soaring tasks become, the more time I have to look ahead and formulate Plans B,C,D and E in case Plan A doesn’t work out.

Hope this helps,

Frank(TA)

 

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