Flying lessons can be expensive, weather-dependent and sometimes further apart than we’d like. But learning to fly doesn’t stop when the aircraft is parked.

The time between lessons is where you can turn something you understood once into something that is much easier to recall when you actually need it. That matters because aviation rarely gives you the luxury of remembering things in isolation. In the aircraft, you’re flying, looking outside, listening to the radio, thinking ahead and perhaps dealing with something unexpected at the same time.

So when deciding what to study between lessons, a useful question is not simply:

“What should I revise?”

It’s:

“What do I want to be able to recall more easily when I’m busy flying the aircraft?”

Start with the things you needed on your last flight

Your most recent lesson is usually the best place to begin.

Think back over the flight and ask yourself what your instructor had to prompt you on. Was there a check you hesitated over? A radio call you weren’t quite ready for? A procedure where you knew roughly what to do but had to think hard about the sequence?

Those are useful things to practise because you’ve already seen why they matter in the aircraft.

If you have recently learned the pattern of checks for a forced landing without power, for example, don’t wait until the next time your instructor closes the throttle to see whether you can still remember it. Keep bringing the sequence back.

The more often you retrieve it, the easier it becomes to retrieve again.

Don’t just read procedures — rehearse them

It is very easy to look through a checklist or procedure and think:

“Yep, I know that.”

Recognition can be deceptive.

A better test is to put the notes away and talk yourself through it.

What comes first?

What are you trying to achieve?

What follows?

What would you be looking for outside the aircraft while doing it?

If you get stuck, check the correct procedure, then try again later without looking.

The aim is not to memorise a page of words. It’s to make the underlying sequence and priorities familiar enough that you don’t have to build them again from scratch every time.

Practise while your brain is doing something else

This is where aviation practice becomes a little different from ordinary revision.

If you practise a forced-landing sequence while sitting silently at a desk with nothing else happening, you’re practising in conditions that don’t resemble the situation in which you’ll eventually need it.

In the aircraft, you also need to fly.

So once a procedure is already familiar, try retrieving it while doing another routine activity.

For example, you might run through a familiar sequence while:

  • driving on a normal, familiar journey;
  • cycling on an easy, familiar route;
  • bouncing a ball;
  • doing a simple repetitive household task;
  • carrying out another activity that requires some of your attention.

The idea is not to deliberately overwhelm yourself. It’s simply to make recall compete with another task.

That can expose the difference between knowing something when it’s the only thing you’re thinking about and being able to retrieve it while part of your attention is elsewhere.

Aviate, navigate, communicate — even when you’re practising

If you practise while driving or cycling, driving or riding safely must remain your first priority at all times.

There is a useful parallel here with the familiar aviation principle:

Aviate, navigate, communicate.

If something more important demands your attention in the aircraft, you stop doing the lower-priority task and fly the aeroplane. You might pause a checklist, delay a radio call or come back to something once the immediate workload is under control.

Use the same principle here. If traffic becomes busy, you’re approaching an intersection, road conditions change or anything else needs your attention, stop the aviation practice and concentrate fully on driving or riding.

The aim is to practise retrieving familiar knowledge while some of your attention is occupied — not to compete with something that genuinely needs your focus.

Practise the reasoning as well as the sequence

Procedures are more useful when you understand what they’re trying to achieve.

So as well as remembering the order of a check, ask yourself questions such as:

Why am I doing this?

What am I trying to establish?

What would change what I do next?

What else would I need to be looking at?

Take the forced-landing example again. Remembering the checks matters, but so does understanding that you are simultaneously managing the aircraft, maintaining an appropriate speed, selecting somewhere suitable to go and continuing to reassess the situation.

Mental rehearsal should include that bigger picture.

That is closer to flying than simply reciting a list.

Use retrieval practice for theory too

The same principle applies to knowledge that needs to come back quickly in the cockpit.

Meteorological minima are a good example.

It’s easy to look at the relevant information and think that you understand it. The more useful test is whether you can retrieve the requirement when somebody asks you unexpectedly.

The same applies to things such as:

  • airspace;
  • altimetry;
  • weather;
  • operational rules;
  • radio procedures;
  • aircraft limitations;
  • flight-test knowledge.

Rather than repeatedly rereading a page, make yourself answer questions without looking first.

This is one reason we built Practice Round into Aviate. It gives you questions without allowing you to choose only the areas you already feel comfortable with, so you’re repeatedly asking your brain to find information rather than simply recognise it.

Free Aviate users can complete five Practice Round questions each day, while Aviate Pro removes the daily limit.

The point isn’t to race through as many questions as possible. It’s to keep making the path back to that knowledge easier to find.

Flight Radio needs the same kind of active practice

Radio is another area where passive study can give you a false sense of confidence.

You can read a call and recognise that it sounds right without necessarily being able to produce it when you’re flying the aircraft and suddenly need to transmit.

So practise it out loud.

If you’re driving along a quiet familiar road, for example, imagine you’re approaching an aerodrome and make the call. A few minutes later, change the scenario and make another one.

Again, road safety comes first. But that small amount of divided attention can actually be useful: you’re forcing yourself to retrieve and speak the information while doing something else at the same time.

That’s much closer to the real challenge than silently reading example calls on a page.

We explored this in more detail in How to get more confident with Flight Radio before you key the mic.

Keep coming back to the same knowledge

You don’t need to find a completely new topic every time you study.

In fact, often the opposite is more useful.

If you learnt something important on Monday, bring it back on Tuesday. Try it again later in the week. Then revisit it the following week.

Each successful retrieval makes that knowledge a little easier to access next time.

That’s the basic idea behind a lot of Aviate’s learning design: short sessions, repeated retrieval and regular opportunities to revisit what you’ve already learned.

For more on making repeated retrieval and short, regular sessions part of your routine, read How to make aviation study stick between flying lessons.

You are trying to turn:

“I remember being taught this”

into:

“I can get this back when I need it.”

Preview the next flight too

Between-flight study doesn’t all have to look backwards.

If you know what you’re likely to be doing next, spend a little time preparing for it.

You don’t need to teach yourself the whole exercise. Your instructor will do that. But you can make sure the basic knowledge isn’t completely new when you arrive.

If your next lesson is likely to involve a new procedure, for example, understand the broad purpose of it. If there are radio calls you’re likely to make, rehearse them. If there is some underlying theory you haven’t looked at for a while, bring it back.

That means when you get into the aircraft, more of your attention can go into the flying itself.

Take questions back to your instructor

One of the best outcomes from practising between flights is discovering the parts you don’t understand as well as you thought.

Write those down.

Perhaps you can remember a sequence but aren’t sure why one part is there. Perhaps you keep getting a particular Practice Round question wrong. Perhaps there is a radio situation where you don’t know what you’d say.

Take that question back to your instructor.

Independent practice is most useful when it supports your flying lessons rather than trying to replace them.

A little, often

You don’t need another hour-long study session every evening.

Ten or fifteen useful minutes might be enough to:

  • run through a procedure while doing something else;
  • answer a few theory questions;
  • make a couple of radio calls;
  • recall what happened on your last flight;
  • prepare one thing for the next one.

Then do some of it again another day.

The aim is not to spend as much time studying as possible. It is to make important knowledge easier to retrieve under workload.

Because in the aircraft, you won’t only be remembering the procedure.

You’ll be flying as well.

And the more often you’ve practised finding that knowledge before you need it, the more likely it is to be there when you do.

Aviate is a supplementary learning and revision tool. Procedures and operational information should always be checked against current approved material and the guidance of your flight instructor.