By Rod Machado
Ain’t nobody going to deny that jets are sexy. If you’re like some flight instructors, you salivate over these heavy-metal machines in the same way cats stare at fish in an aquarium. With their sleek designs, blistering speeds, and advanced automation, flying jets
implies (to some pilots) that you have woken up, evolved, and ascended to the highest level of aviation achievement. For some CFIs eyeing an airline career, this fascination can morph into a condition I call Jet Brain.
My first experience with Jet Brain occurred decades ago when a fellow instructor obtained a type rating in a Boeing 737. Proudly displaying his new certificate to our flight school’s CFIs, he announced, “We’ve got to start teaching our students the same procedures used to fly the jets.”
“Huh? Why would we want to teach primary students to fly as if they are operating a jet?” I asked.
“Because it’s a more proficient and precise way to fly,” he responded.
Prior to his heavy-metal enlightenment, this fellow had a small-airplane mentality; after it, his cranial lobes revealed they had been reformatted to the jet-brain operating system. For jet-man, every maneuver had a procedure to follow, a checklist to honor, and an ATP-like performance standard to meet. In his mind, jet-brain thinking elevated him to an exalted level of airmanship.
Unfortunately, Jet Brain is a mindset where some instructors (certainly not all), enamored with heavy metal flying, teach their primary students to operate small, piston-powered airplanes as if they were large heavy-metal machines. While seemingly a shortcut to advanced airmanship, it’s actually an instructional pathology undermining the foundational skills student pilots need to fly safely. Let’s look at the origins, psychological drivers, impacts, and remedies for Jet Brain, emphasizing why small airplane techniques are critical for safe and effective flight training.
Please "Jet-Splain" More About Jet Brain
Jet Brain emerges when some flight instructors, often newly certified or moonlighting as jet copilots, prioritize jet-airplane procedures over the fundamentals of small airplane flying. These instructors, many of whom have airline ambitions, view jet piloting as the ultimate expression of airmanship. It’s a perception that dominates their teaching strategy, leading them to abandon the basic principles governing small, piston-powered airplanes in favor of jet-style procedures. This is why some instructors teaching in a Cessna 172 use phrases such as “V1, rotate!” or “Let’s bring out that post takeoff checklist,” or even “Gear up,” which, of course, is a bit nutty in a Cessna 172. It’s not, however, nutty to some instructors. More than a few of them require their student pilots to play pretend by mimicking raising the landing gear in a fixed-gear airplane. The reason? Supposedly, it prepares them to fly larger airplanes one day, even if the student is a 75-year-old woman with a prosthetic leg and an eye patch. Personally, I wonder why these same instructors don’t ask ground control for a “push back” prior to taxiing their Cessna 150.
The problem here lies in the fundamental mismatch between small and large (jet-type) aircraft. While jets and small airplanes both require good stick-and-rudder skills, their operational realities are anything but similar. Jets are heavier, faster, and more stable. They typically have multiple engines, advanced avionics, flight management systems, and can easily operate above or around severe weather. Small single-engine airplanes, by contrast, are lightweight, slower, less stable, and can’t climb above anything. OK, while they can go around severe weather given enough time, they aren’t climbing above it. Small airplanes require two hands and two feet on the flight deck to operate. Operation of larger jet-type airplanes typically requires four hands and four feet on the flight deck, with cockpit duties shared between pilot and copilot. Jet Brain instructors often overlook these differences.
The Origins of Jet Brain
For some instructors, teaching in a small airplane might feel like a temporary but frustrating detour, a distraction from their ultimate goal of flying jets. As a result, they might vicariously fulfill these ambitions by projecting jet-flying techniques onto the noggins of their primary students. These same instructors unconsciously model their teaching after airline pilots they admire under the assumption that their students share a similar fascination with jets. Psychologists refer to this as aspirational modeling. Ultimately, students of Jet Brain instructors are encouraged to mimic airline-type cockpit resource management protocols, many of which are overly complex and inappropriate for solo VFR operations in a Piper Cherokee.
Flight schools catering to airline-bound pilots might also reinforce the jet brain mindset. It’s easy to see why instructors could feel pressure to align their instruction with this trajectory. However, this training bias devalues the critical role of small airplane skills, which form the bedrock of all piloting, including jet operations.
Why Small Airplane Skills Matter
The fact is that there’s almost nothing about flying larger airplanes that applies to small ones, while nearly everything about flying small airplanes pertains to flying larger ones. The stick-and-rudder skills honed in a Piper Cub—maintaining coordinated flight, anticipating and recovering from stalls, executing precise landings—translate directly to jet cockpits. Jets require these same skills, albeit with modifications for speed, weight, and automation. For example, a jet’s yaw damper may reduce the need for rudder input. Nevertheless, pilots must still understand the use of the rudder for scenarios such as crosswind landings and engine-out emergencies, all of which are concepts rooted in small airplane training.
Conversely, jet-specific techniques rarely apply to small airplanes. Jets operate in highly structured environments, following instrument landing system (ILS) profiles and relying heavily on automation for efficiency and safety. Almost all airline (jet) operations are conducted on an IFR flight plan where workloads are shared between pilot and copilot. Small airplanes, especially during primary training, operate under visual flight rules (VFR), where pilots manage every aspect of flight alone. Teaching students to fly a Cessna like a jet ignores these realities, creating habits that are inefficient at best and hazardous at worst.
For instance, one of the most glaring manifestations of Jet Brain is in the traffic pattern. Small single-engine airplanes are safest when flown within power-off gliding distance of the runway, traffic permitting. This ensures a higher probability of gliding to a safe landing in the event of an engine failure (see graphic below).
Jets, however, follow entirely different traffic patterns. Their stability, multiple engines, and higher speeds allow for longer and wider patterns, with shallower (ILS-profile-type) approaches, often extending miles from the runway. Jet Brain instructors may teach students to mimic these extended patterns, flying wide, low circuits that take them away from the runway. Safety margins are reduced, along with a diminished understanding of the airplane’s power-off glide potential. Ignorance of this concept could be catastrophic in a small airplane if the engine fails.
The Advanced Avionics Issue
Jet Brain training also diminishes the depth to which students understand basic flying principles. For instance, students taught to rely primarily on GPS navigation during cross-country flights (in lieu of dead reckoning or pilotage) might have much less checkpoint-to-checkpoint awareness of the terrain below them. Students might effectively be lost until reaching the very end of the moving map’s magenta line. That’s because moving maps focus the student’s attention on the destination, not necessarily on the path taken by the airplane to arrive there. Ultimately, students develop less awareness of the terrain below them, which is essential should an emergency or precautionary off-field landing become necessary.
Autopilot emphasis is another example where instructors afflicted with Jet Brain abandon stick-and-rudder competency for “button, bug, and knob” automation skills employed by airline pilots. It’s true that private pilot applicants might be asked to demonstrate autopilot usage when that equipment is available during a checkride. However, autopilot skills shouldn’t be a substitute for yoke and pedal proficiency. I’ve seen newly rated private pilots use an airplane’s autopilot (some of which are quite sophisticated) immediately after liftoff and all the way into the destination traffic pattern, without once touching the flight controls. This comports with the “engage early, disengage late” airline-autopilot philosophy. Jet Brain instructors are often more than willing to foist a similar strategy on primary students.
Thank You, FAA
The FAA ultimately bears a fair share of the responsibility for the jet-brain malady afflicting some of today’s flight instructors (I say some, but certainly not all instructors). For instance, there was a time when we expressed the principle of attitude flying as attitude plus power equals performance. Today, thanks to a misguided rewrite of the FAA’s Airplane Flying Handbook, this statement devolved into jet-brain language and now reads pitch plus power equals energy state. Some instructors go “gaga” over this aeronautically neutered maxim for one reason: it uses the words energy state. These words fire the loins of anyone imagining themselves as a heavy metal pilot, given the assumption that airline pilots think of a jet’s performance in terms of potential or kinetic energy. The reality is that any pilot (flying small or large airplanes) must think in terms of airspeed and altitude first before expressing an airplane’s energy state as potential or kinetic. (Read: Fantasy Based Energy Management Training for more info on this topic.)
While I can list many examples of how the FAA cultivates the jet-brain mindset in its instructors, here’s one more for consideration. Years ago, the FAA encouraged instructors to forgo training primary students in the practice area. Now, the FAA encourages instructors to teach the basics of flying during cross-country trips. This new process is known as the train like you fly; fly like you train philosophy. In other words, if students are expected to use an airplane for travel, then train them while they travel. This almost seems as if someone stumbled upon a phrase that rhymed and then decided to build a training philosophy around it. Good golly!
Here’s how this training strategy looks in practice. Beginning on the student’s first lesson, a cross-country flight is planned and flown, completely bypassing the practice area. The four fundamentals of flight (straight-level, climbs, turns, and descents) are introduced during this trip, followed by slow flight, stalls, etc., on subsequent cross-country flights. This was manna from heaven for Jet Brain instructors. If they weren’t flying jets already, they could simulate what jet pilots do—go places in an airplane. It seems to me that the folks recommending these fantasy-based training strategies have never tested the educational value. I suspect they wouldn’t be happy with the results if they did.
What Are We to Do?
The jet-brain mindset among some flight instructors poses a challenge to effective primary flight training. These instructors, captivated by the allure of jet aircraft, often apply sophisticated airline procedures to students learning in small, piston-powered planes, taking the focus off of stick-and-rudder skill development. By emphasizing jet-style practices—like extended traffic patterns, heavy reliance on automation, and over-reliance on checklists—instructors may foster unsafe habits and weaken students’ grasp of core flying principles. Addressing this issue at the primary level of training requires a renewed emphasis on small airplane flight skills. This is most likely to happen at the flight school level and not with FAA management. Here is where chief pilots might ensure primary training remains tailored to the unique demands of light aircraft, equipping students with the versatile, hands-on proficiency needed for all levels of aviation.