Page 10 - January 23

automation management is the goal. In either case, using airports, instrument procedures (IAPs) or practice areas you don’t use regularly will benefit your learning more than using the same places and IAPs you are already deeply familiar with. Either can be fun by simply breaking up the monotony of your routine practice and making it more deliberate in nature.
Combining deliberate practice with adventure flying can also be a way to inject fun into the equation. However, I caution against relying too much on combining adventures and training/practice. Such flying often involves long cross-country flight segments that are filled mostly with low-key cruise flight that is not overly beneficial. It can be, in fact, almost the antithesis of deliberate practice. Designing deliberate practice sessions requires a bit more creativity than simply saying, “I’ve always wanted to go to [insert destination]. Let’s do that today and make it into a lesson.”
Defining Deliberate Practice
According to K. Andres Ericsson, the late Swedish psychologist and professor who researched the psycho- logical nature of expertise and human performance, deliberate practice will have four essential components:
1. The practicer must be motivated to attend to the task while truly exerting effort to improve performance.
2. The task needs to be designed specifically to take into account preexisting knowledge so that the task can be correctly understood from the beginning or after a brief period of instruction.
3. The practicer needs to be able to receive immediate and informative feedback. One must know and understand the results of their performance.
4. Repetition of the same or similar tasks is required to achieve expert level results.
Within aviation, the use of skilled instructors can help achieve elements #2 and #3 (and #4, to a lesser extent). The practicer is solely responsible for bringing motivation – element #1 – to the table and for ensuring they consistently adhere to repetition, element #4. Your contribution to successful deliberate practice cannot be overstated. You cannot allow yourself to be an excuse maker.
It is how you practice that matters the most. Your practice must challenge you. Repetition is important, but once a task is mastered, that repetition must be moved up a notch so that you are not repeatedly doing what you already know how to do at a level below what you are capable of. So a keen self-understanding of your weaknesses and strengths is critical. From that, invent tasks to address weaknesses and to further develop strengths.
8 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
JANUARY 2023