Navigation systems and radar services

What this lesson is for: teaching the navigation equipment that is actually in the panel, and teaching a student to use ATC services rather than to avoid them.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation II, Task H.
• The avionics documentation for the airplane you will instruct in.
• The AIM sections on radar services and transponder operation.
• From live eCFR: 91.215.

Deliverable: Write out, word for word, the radio call you would teach a student to make when requesting flight following. Then write what you would say to a student who does not want to make it.

That second part is the real exercise. Most primary students are nervous on the radio and will quietly never ask for services, for years, unless somebody makes it easy.

1. The navigation equipment actually installed in your training aircraft.
2. GPS, and how it fails.
3. VOR: how it works, how it is checked, what it will not do.
4. Electronic flight bags, and the failure your student has to have a plan for.
5. Radar services, and what ATC is and is not doing for you.
6. Transponder operation and codes.
7. Getting a student to actually ask for services.
8. You teach.

• Teach an assigned element for about eight minutes, referring to the panel you will actually instruct in.
• Talk a reluctant student into making a radio call, without ordering them to.

1. You teach an assigned element for about eight minutes, referring to the equipment actually installed in the training aircraft.
2. You state what flight following does and does not provide, correctly, including that it does not relieve the pilot of seeing and avoiding.
3. You name one GPS failure mode and what the student would do about it.
4. You get the reluctant student to make the radio call, by addressing the reluctance rather than by instructing them to.
5. You state what a student does when the electronic flight bag fails, in terms of what they must have aboard.
6. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

• Teaching a generic GPS rather than the one in your panel. Every box has its own quirks and your student will fly that one.
• Treating flight following as traffic separation. It is not, and a student who believes it is will stop looking outside. This is the safety point of the lesson.
• Telling the nervous student to make the call. That gets you compliance today and nothing afterwards. Deal with why they do not want to.
• Treating a tablet as infallible. They overheat, and they quit on the day it is hot and you are busy.
• Skipping VOR as obsolete. It is on the ACS, and it works when other things do not.

Not applicable. Ground lesson.

This lesson has no Video Slots.