From Clueless to Confident: Overcoming Technical Fears in Aviation

Like so many things in my aviation career, what I perceived and what actually happened were worlds apart.

Let’s go back to the very beginning. My first PPL lecture was on Aircraft Technical. While I am now technically minded and even used to service my own car before it basically became a computer, when I started flying, I hadn’t needed to be technical. Growing up, my mum’s company had a workshop with people who would fix anything I needed fixing – and I was young and pretty – if I got a flat tyre, it wouldn’t be long before someone stopped to help.

So, I was the only girl in a class of about 40 guys, and this young instructor, who wasn’t much older than us, stood at the front of the classroom and started explaining how pistons and cylinders worked. I was totally clueless, and the more the instructor tried to explain, the more confused I became. Then the whole class started laughing.

I quickly stopped asking questions and spent the rest of our aircraft technical lectures doodling, resigned to the fact that I was a girl and would never understand the technical stuff.

However, I was not going to quit; I just needed to find another way to understand this. So, I walked into the aircraft hangar at the flight school and found a lovely old engineer. I explained to him that somehow I had to get through these exams and that I was useless and totally stuck.

He took me under his wing and was so patient, showing me all around the aircraft. He would call me if there was an MPI or engine change or any other maintenance that he thought would be interesting to me and that I could learn from.

Although I passed my exams, I have always had a fear of all things technical and always called it the “boy subject.” Ironically, I know four people with an aeronautical engineering degree, and three of them are women.

I initially chalked the incident in the classroom up to sexism and tried to move on from it. However, a few years later, this instructor and I crossed paths again, and I realised he really wasn’t very sexist. The further my journey in instruction took me, the more I realised he was just inexperienced.

This incident has stayed with me throughout my whole career, but not as a negative. I have used it as a teaching moment.

When I first started getting involved in training, I was doing some freelance work at a local sim centre, and the head of training asked if I could give the technical lecture. I panicked and told him that I was literally the last person he should pick. I explained how this incident had made me doubt myself and that I had no confidence in this area.

He was a retired chief pilot of a rather large airline. He got me a cup of coffee, and we sat down. He told me that I was a pretty good instructor and had a unique way of explaining things. I am also very dyslexic, so I see the world in a slightly different way.

He told me that my experience would make me a better instructor because I don’t want anyone to feel like I did in that class. He was right. I start every new class with this story and tell everyone that there are no stupid questions; if you have to ask, you really don’t know the answer.

This head of training also made me see that this instructor was just a kid like I was. He didn’t have enough life experience or knowledge to explain it in another way, and he didn’t have the instructional experience to control the class.

This conversation was one of the turning points in my career. It was when I realised the direction of training I wanted to pursue. I wanted to help flight schools improve their theoretical knowledge training.

I realised that not much had changed since my first PPL lecture. The newest, youngest instructors were still either reading from the book or delivering death by PowerPoint. The material hadn’t changed much – it was still very black and white, with some fancier images, sometimes given in a digital format. Often, ATPL is lectured by the newly minted instructor who got their ATPL subject a few months back. As a very good friend of mine says: "They are one page ahead of the students in the book."

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The industry acknowledges that we have the KSA triangle, and the K, which is Knowledge, is the base of the triangle. When you build anything, the foundation should be rock solid.

So why don’t we turn the industry around? I know change is scary – it is a change that I face daily when people say it isn’t broken – it works – but does it?

I speak to lots of people, and they all talk about how many students don’t make it past the interview. We also know how many students don’t make it through the initial training. Often, when you scratch below the surface, it’s knowledge that is lacking, as well as other soft skills.

These students have been spoon-fed, relied on question banks, and given a shaky foundation by instructors who are chasing hours. While they might be book smart, they don’t have a wide range of life experience. They haven’t flown through thunderstorms, landed at airports with high-density altitudes, or flown down to minima fighting a 50-knot wind.

Airlines are spending money on cadet programmes to train up all these new pilots, many of them women, and some men who may eventually find the lifestyle too difficult to balance with having a family and a career.

I am working on a programme with an airline that utilises very experienced instructors, and we are going to be running a pilot programme where we teach these students from the beginning as they would in an airline setting. The airline is subsidising the theoretical knowledge instructors' salaries, as all of the instructors have years of experience. They will not only be able to teach the theoretical knowledge from a view of having been there and done that, but they also have life skills – some extra gained by raising children.

The end product will be a group of students with a very solid knowledge foundation and the soft skills they were taught to navigate the very computer-based training environment of an airline.

This, to me, is another solution to retaining this knowledge pool of pilots who will leave to look after their children. Is it not better for airlines to get more involved in the ab initio training of students and funnel funding into these types of programmes?

Also, integrating some of their pilots as instructors would provide a more 9-to-5 type job, which is much easier to work around a childcare programme for parents.