Visual scanning, collision avoidance, and runway incursion avoidance

What this lesson is for: teaching a scan your student can actually run, and teaching runway incursion avoidance as a procedure instead of a warning.

"Keep a good lookout" is not teaching. Your student cannot do anything with it. Both subjects on this page are ones that kill instructors, and both are usually taught as exhortation.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation II, Tasks B and C.
• FAA-H-8083-25C, the sections on vision and collision avoidance, plus the October 2025 addendum.
• From live eCFR: 91.113.
• The airport diagram for the field you will instruct at.

Deliverable: Write the scan you will teach a student, as a sequence with timings. Then write, in two sentences, how your own scan will be worse when you are instructing from the right seat, and one thing you will do about that.

1. How the eye actually works: focal and peripheral vision, empty field myopia, your blind spot.
2. A scan a student can run, and why sharing time between inside and outside is the hard part.
3. Collision avoidance, right of way, and the aircraft that does not appear to move.
4. Your own scan while instructing, which is worse than your scan while flying.
5. Runway incursion avoidance: signs, markings, lighting, hold short lines.
6. Taxi procedures that prevent incursions.
7. You teach.

• Teach an assigned element for about eight minutes.
• Catch a taxi clearance readback that is wrong in a plausible way, and correct it without taking over.
• Say honestly how much of your attention will be inside the cockpit when you are teaching.

1. You teach an assigned element for about eight minutes, giving a method a student could run rather than an instruction to be careful.
2. You catch the incorrect taxi readback and correct it without taking over.
3. You state how your own scan degrades while instructing and name one specific mitigation you will use.
4. You teach a scan pattern with a stated timing, not "keep looking around".
5. You use the actual airport diagram for the field in question.
6. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

• Teaching "be vigilant". Your student will nod and do nothing differently.
• Teaching a scan and ignoring the time-sharing problem. A student with their head in the cockpit is not scanning, and they have a lot of reasons to have their head in the cockpit.
• Never having thought about your own scan while instructing. You will be watching the panel, the student's hands, and the student's face. That is three places that are not outside. Almost nobody has considered this before this lesson.
• Teaching signs and markings as a memory test. It is a taxi procedure with a diagram open.
• Grabbing the controls to fix a readback. Correct it. Do not seize it.
• Treating right of way as trivia. It is what you apply in about three seconds.

Not applicable. Ground lesson.

This lesson has no Video Slots.