The show hits the road for "Redbird Migration" in Colorado, and we're talking all things sims!
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00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop S73 Cherokee number two following twin traffic three mile final one trolley bravo makesford in Runway two five going four mile.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:27
Bobby Doss
What's up Wally?
00:28
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:29
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. We are in Colorado at Redbird migration and we have Josh Harnigle with us. He is the vice president of customer experience and I would say a friend of mine. Now he's been involved with a number of things at my fly school, most recently doing customer service. He brought my new monitors and installed them in my Redbird. When we bought that Redbird, Josh, we had to be at the top of the list. Like we bought that thing early days. It's like 101 or something. Is the serial number.
01:00
Josh Harnigle
Yeah, that SIM was probably in the second year of our deliveries that unit got installed there hooks and.
01:09
Bobby Doss
What'S beautiful is it's been there forever. And I upgraded the computer two years ago monitors this year everyone's talking about the monitors. Made a huge difference in the usability, almost double the real estate for video. And we incorporate it all the time. Wally gets to use the sim. He has been in there shooting things and practicing stuff, although he gets to do it in the big birds every day. It's very practical to use the sim often in this event, you just did a ceremony or a show on the flight training survey y' all just released. Tell the listeners a little bit about the flight training survey and what you think Redbird learns and shares with the flight training community in that survey.
01:52
Josh Harnigle
Yeah. So five years ago, coming out of COVID basically were kind of looking at the ecosystem, the flight training ecosystem, from sort of beginning to end. So prospective students all the way through, DPEs, you know, flight school owners, flight instructors, and there's not really a comprehensive study of year to year, how's the industry doing and what are the trends that start to develop underneath there. And in some ways, one of the things that makes migration really impactful and powerful for people is that it's one of the only places where flight schools can kind of get together, especially at that time, and network and talk.
02:34
Josh Harnigle
And that was one of the things that always came up when we asked people about migration, is that they got to get anecdotal information from other flight school owners about how business is, how they what are the best practices that kind of thing. And so coming out of COVID we sort of said, well, let's. Let's just ask a bunch of questions, sort of throw stuff at the wall and see what we can learn from that. Both for us as a, you know, a vendor, supplier, but also we want to share it with the industry. And so we pull. We survey everybody that's we've got anything involved with flight training.
03:12
Josh Harnigle
And you can kind of see some interesting stuff that comes out of it where there's differences of opinion based on or differences of perspective based on where you are in the industry, whether you're a student or an instructor or a flight school owner. You can also start to see things like, you know, one of the noticeable things that we've really seen is the cost of flight training has gone up dramatically over the last five years, and it shows up very cleanly in that data. We'll say this year it's sort of starting to level out, which is probably a good thing.
03:42
Bobby Doss
And the stats, the boards, that's a whole document that you guys give away as well, right? It's available on your website. You want to give a link and maybe a button they can click.
03:51
Josh Harnigle
Yeah. So, yeah. So the report for this past year, the 2024 survey, was released today, and it's kind of a snapshot. We run it from January 5, February 5, and it's March 4, so it's, you know, it's only about a month old. And it's on our website, State of Flight Training. And if you subscribe to any Redbird newsletters, you're going to get it, no doubt. And, you know, it's got really detailed breakdowns of each segment of the population, depending on what their, you know, their role in aviation is. And then it kind of goes into some more depth around sort of the bigger picture issues around cost, time to complete, how the industry feels like it's doing from a business perspective, etc.
04:39
Bobby Doss
You're probably going to not like me, but I think I didn't get to it this year. Josh, I apologize.
04:44
Josh Harnigle
That's okay.
04:45
Bobby Doss
But I also didn't share with my flight instructors, and when I heard you speaking a while ago, I was kind of shocked that other schools shared with their flight instructors. I'll do a much better job next year. You'll get 50 or so responses from my team. But what. What do people do if they didn't get the survey from y' all this year? Is there a way they can go sign up or get on some sort of a mailing list so you can ask them next year.
05:02
Josh Harnigle
Yeah, if you go to our website, redbirdflight.com we will actively ask for your email address and that's the easiest way to get on that list. And then, you know, this year, 2026, I guess we'll somewhere around, you know, the 3rd, 4th or 5th of January, we'll open it up for everybody to kind of give their feedback on 2025.
05:29
Bobby Doss
Yeah, some of the stuff's super obvious to me, like there's a way for DPEs. Some people travel a long distance to go meet DPEs. I know how busy Wally is. He's not got any extra time in his day or to do an extra checkride. But some of the things were interesting like the pricing comparisons. I know they're means medians of pricing, but a lot of it kind of fits my fleet. Right. Some of my things are cheaper than what those the median was. I'm clearly not renting my multi enough at a higher dollar level. But a lot of it did kind of compare to our school, but we're in that medium sized school range.
06:04
Bobby Doss
So if there's students out there at small schools or students in big college type campuses, they can kind of get a comparison of where their numbers are and what their length of times are. Again, all a bigger swath because it's so many. Almost 1500 people you said responded this year. So it's not like just on their school, but gives them a pretty good idea of what the state of flight training is for them.
06:28
Josh Harnigle
Yeah, it's kind of designed to give a benchmark. You know, broadly speaking, this is about middle of the road for a lot of those sorts of things. And I will say, you know, if you're a Redbird customer and we don't probably advertise this enough, but we can, you know, I can spit out a data set for you that's really targeted at flight schools that are your size and you can really get a better understanding of, you know, apples to apples comparison.
06:55
Bobby Doss
Yeah, I need that copy from you for sure. So obviously we're a Redbird customer. We've used the Redbird for a long time. I'm an owner of a flight school who doesn't have enough assets to train in. So we want the SIM to be used as much as possible. What do you think the general community of students, flight School owners, DPs, what are we not doing enough to incorporate the SIM into our training?
07:18
Josh Harnigle
Yeah, I think honestly it probably starts with recognizing the SIM is a teaching tool and not really about necessarily logging time. I mean, you can log time in it. And especially for something like an instrument rating, it can be a significant amount of time, like half of your rating. But if you look at the average private pilot, I don't know the exact number now, but it's probably somewhere around 70 hours in the logbook by the time they get their checkride. 30 of those hours are not required.
07:55
Josh Harnigle
So if you were to say, let's take 15 of those or 20 of those hours and put them in the simulation, at the end of the day, it'll cost less money for the student to get their license and they'll better prepared for the real world because you're able to do stuff in the sim that's just not safe to do in the airplane. You know, there's probably very few private pilots who've ever practiced an engine out at 100ft right after liftoff. And that's a perfect thing to do in the sim for sure. You know, then you can build that push response, which is very counterintuitive in that situation. So I mean, that's just one example. But there's, there's lots of places to use it. The real barrier tends to be the instructors.
08:37
Bobby Doss
Yes, it is. And it's because they're not going to get any time out of it. I swear I'm going to solve that problem one day. But until that number changes, I don't think I'm going to be very effective. But I've got some ideas from some other fly schools that I've met here at Migration this week to integrated into our maybe in standardization, some maybe in how we keep our instructors proficient and maybe give some away to our students to give them a taste so they really understand the value of it. If you are a listener of the show I keep talking about every week, and you're probably gonna get tired of it, but I got my first type rating about a month ago in the Vision Jet and I was shocked how much we used desktop simulators.
09:20
Bobby Doss
Yeah, they have kind of your TD2 in every room in the Vision Jet training center. And it's more about the buttonology. And I appreciated that so much that I think we're gonna end up with a couple TD2s depending on how good of a deal you give me at UFS in the future. Because it really is a way to learn how to do stuff. Wally is a dpe. Do people make mistakes doing this or doing something with this? And I'm pointing the Brain.
09:51
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, no, it's, you know, on an instrument checkride especially. I can't tell you how many times I've watched an applicant load the same approach 18 times looking for different results. You know, and that old definition of insanity, you know, look, trying to find a transition on the approach, they load it in and they can't find it. Then they deleted and they put it back in. And I'm just, you know, I, we're not allowed to teach or really say anything on a checkride and it's, it's agony on me. I just want to say, just push this button and it's going to be there for you. But yeah, that's stuff that, you know, it, you know, even a cheap airplane, you're spending, you know, $140 an hour, that's over $2aminute.
10:41
Wally Mulhern
You know, where a sim, the instructor can stop, you can freeze and say, okay, here's what you need to do. This is why you can't find that transition, because you got to find the one beyond it and then go from there.
10:55
Josh Harnigle
Yeah, and this is kind of anecdotal story, but when I used to be a full time flight instructor before Redbird existed, and one of the things that was the most painful for me was a private pilot student learning how to enter the pattern and you know, you demonstrate it, you do this stuff, they kind of know the deal, but they got to practice. And it is, you know, you're 10 miles from the airport and they got to pick up the wind, figure out the Runway alignment, how they're going to enter the pattern on a 45 and all this stuff. And they get one or two practices a lesson typically, and you end up keeping them from going solo cross country because you don't trust them to actually enter the pattern correctly.
11:37
Josh Harnigle
They can navigate to the airport, but are they going to end up over the top of the airport at 5,000ft and figure out, freak out, how they're going to get down? And the sim is perfect for that. I actually built a lesson that is literally just traffic pattern entry. And for an instructor, it's an hour to save a lot of frustration.
11:55
Wally Mulhern
All right, well, you teed one up on me because two months ago I started beating this drum and I made a morbid prediction. I said, one of the next accidents we're gonna have in general aviation is a mid air collision at a non controlled airport in a flight training situation. We had one just northwest of Phoenix, Tucson, just A few weeks ago and two dead people. And problem I see on checkrides, especially instructor checkrides, I don't do initial CFIs, but I double eyes and Meis is there's so much talking going on from the applicant, the instructor to be there just. That's oral diarrhea. All this stuff is just coming out of their mouth that we don't want to come out of their mouth. Because I'm worried about those four guys in the traffic pattern who are trying to kill us.
12:48
Wally Mulhern
But he's telling me, you know, all this. All this stuff, we're just talking so much. So if you can teach procedures in a simulator environment where there's not those four guys in the traffic pattern trying to kill us now when you get in the airplane, you don't have to talk so much.
13:05
Josh Harnigle
Yeah. And one of the things that the most important button in the sim and also the most abused button in the sim is the pause button. If a student gets to the point where they're not learning anymore, their RAM is full pause. But if they're still learning and they're behind the airplane, let them catch up. Because that's a super important skill that even now, as a, you know, CFI with an instrument rating and all that, there are times when I'm behind the airplane and you gotta. You gotta get ahead of it at points, and the sim's just an awesome place to do that.
13:38
Bobby Doss
Well, once you also get behind it and you recover, that's when learning occurs.
13:42
Josh Harnigle
Right.
13:42
Bobby Doss
And that's why the sim is so powerful. I think I was gonna ask. Give me some ideas about private pilots. Everyone's gonna say, we've said it here today already. Everybody gets the use of it. For the instrument student, I am a. I'm the one beating the drum at the flight school. Like, let them go into clouds. Let them have the impossible turn. Give them those opportunities that we're never gonna give them in my plane. Kill the engine, do stuff that I won't let you do to give them that experience. Because they're only gonna be as good as they were the one time they got to try it, right?
14:13
Josh Harnigle
Yeah.
14:13
Bobby Doss
What else should we do in the sim to help private students better? I love the pattern entry, and we're going to incorporate that. But what else do you see that we should be doing?
14:23
Josh Harnigle
So I'll give the official redbird response, and then we can talk a little bit about it. But basically, the easiest way to think about it is never do something in the airplane before you do it in the sim. And if you actually did that, you would maximize utilization the sim. You would super. You would advance their, the timeline for their training. And so any procedure you go out to do in the airplane, at least let them try it once or twice in the sim before they go do it. So it's not like you're in an airplane and you're trying to steep turn for the first time and it's bumpy and you can't even hold your altitude straight and level and on and on. But in sort of practical, the reality is most instructors aren't going to do that.
15:06
Josh Harnigle
Most curriculums aren't really set up for that. And you gotta, you'd have to run your sim sessions in a way that it's like you could do a 15 minute SIM session before an hour and a half flight lesson. And that honestly is hard to schedule sometimes. So in practical terms, I think the place to look is as an instructor, what is it frustrating to watch somebody learn and start there? And so for me it was pattern entries or set up for maneuvers. Any maneuver in the private pilot curriculum is basically, you know, 100 knots at, you know, whatever the power, you know, 2000 RPM or 2200 RPM depending on the airplane. And straight and level. Do your clearing turns. You could do an hour long lesson on, okay, we're at cruise, prepare to enter the path or prepare to go into a maneuver.
15:59
Josh Harnigle
Oh, we're climbing. All right. Level off and level off into a entry into maneuver instead of cruise. And then, you know, people get in that sort of rote habit of I'm leveling off for cruise, even though I'm leveling off to just do maneuvers. You don't need to accelerate to 115 to just pull it back to 100 or whatever the case is. So, you know, it's kind of thinking about it from that perspective and from a flight school side where you want to maybe codify some of this and put it in a curriculum. I think a good place to start is you can do an hour long introductory lesson before a phase, before a block of training that they're going to do three or four lessons in the airplane that'll be like, let's say it's a slow flight, steep turn or slow flight, stalls sequence.
16:54
Josh Harnigle
Right. And by the end of that phase, they'll be able to knock all that out in an hour flight. No problem in the sim. You don't start on the ground. You don't start 15 miles from the practice area. You can start in the air and just go through those, you know, go through those maneuvers three or four times in a one hour period. And you're not really grading on acs or even a level of proficiency, you're just introducing it. So when they get in the airplane, it's not the first time they've seen it. And I think you could schedule those out in sort of blocked sessions in a curriculum and then stage checks. You know, that gets. You see some schools that'll do at least a portion of the stage check or depending on where it is in the curriculum.
17:38
Josh Harnigle
I wouldn't do the pre solo one. That's all landings. But maybe prior to cross country, prior to a checkride, you could do sim sessions there. And that would probably be super beneficial because you can just back up and try it again if the maneuver wasn't right or whatever they're working on.
17:55
Bobby Doss
Well, I mean all good landings start with a stabilized approach, right? So just practicing a stabilized approach over and over again would be very beneficial. And every time were in the sim at the Vision Jet center, there was an emergency occurring. Something was happening, right? And I think I discounted how much we can do in our Red Bird by just having something pull out on the Runway, having the weather go really bad, making sure they don't ever see the Runway. We had to do steep turns in imc. Why not do Steve turns in imc? You would never do it in real Life in a 172, but that would make your stick and rudder skills a whole lot better if you did it with a scan that's not outside counterintuitive, but it would be very beneficial, I'll say.
18:39
Josh Harnigle
So I give a talk sometimes called Best practices for training in Redbird. And one of the things I do point out, especially at the private pilot or instrument level, where they're really learning these skill sets is a lot of instructors think of the sim and they put it in the United Airlines SimCenter context where every flight there is an emergency. I think for a brand new private pilot, you need flights where there's something that goes wrong. But you also need flights where there's not anything that goes wrong because they're just learning basic skill sets. But I'll say if you really integrate it well into a curriculum, a super important thing is to excuse me from the beginning, include realistic weather.
19:27
Josh Harnigle
Like I one of the things I hate about our sims is, and it's the software that it uses, it defaults to completely clear 50 miles of visibility. You're never going to See it like that in the real world. Yeah. Standard atmosphere. If you're able to save flights out and set it up so that you're always have some sort of weather in the scenario that they're doing. And 90% of the time, if you're not teaching a weather event, it leaves the space for the 10% of the time when you are teaching a weather event and it can kind of surprise them. So instead of getting in the sim, it's clear every other time except for this time. It kind of gives it away.
20:05
Bobby Doss
Yeah.
20:07
Wally Mulhern
Well, one thing that I talk about on every one of my checkrides is electrical system failures. And I, I will ask the applicant, I'll say, have you ever. Has your instructor ever turned the master switch off in flight? And they look at me like I'm crying. No, no. Wouldn't want to do that. Well, what's going to happen? I go, the engine should. We should be okay. We should be okay. And I said, yeah. I said, but have you ever done that? And the answer is like 99% of the time the answer is no. Yeah, I, I said, well, why don't we. Today, after we start the engine, let's shut the master switch off on the ground.
20:51
Josh Harnigle
Yeah.
20:52
Wally Mulhern
Okay, now you got a little confidence, you know. You know, maybe you don't want to do it in the air. Maybe you got issues with ADS B and all that kind of stuff, but that's the kind of stuff that you can do for sure in the simulator.
21:07
Bobby Doss
Yeah. It'll teach you how the vacuum system works really quick. When the CFI turns the vacuum system off, y' all can start thinking about questions because we're taking some questions if you have any. The last question is, there's so much time that commercial students can build if they're doing it with an instructor. Where are commercial students missing that opportunity to build those other 30 hours and get that credit? I think college programs incorporated really well because they want to keep their costs down and still charge the student a fortune. How could the, how can commercial students own that and take that on themselves to really get practical training but also maximize their benefit that they have?
21:46
Josh Harnigle
So the easiest for me is if you are time building for a commercial with the intent to be an instructor. So you're on a career path. Those 30 hours that you're going to log towards your commercial should be in the right seat of the sim with the instructor sitting in the left seat. Even if in an FMX where you don't have commercial controls to manipulate. And you should start practicing being an instructor because I think the transition to the instructor program will be much easier and you can hopefully avoid some of that verbal diarrhea because you'll have an actual instructor saying probably a little too much information. And typically what'll happen is in those, if you're doing it in the airplane, you'll time build with a buddy or something and maybe you'll sit in the right seat.
22:34
Josh Harnigle
But you're mostly, you know, you're sightseeing while you're doing that time. And I think that, you know, those are hours that are cheap and gonna really prepare you to go on to that CFI later on.
22:48
Bobby Doss
Yeah, the sim is still going to be cheaper than half of an airplane if you were splitting time. And I think we all know that time's really worthless.
22:56
Josh Harnigle
Right.
22:56
Bobby Doss
It's, it's two friends probably not wearing the foggles, probably going straight and level somewhere far away on autopilot, learning absolutely nothing.
23:04
Josh Harnigle
Right.
23:05
Bobby Doss
But their logbooks getting filled. So challenge yourself to try and incorporate that. Anything else that you think we should do from a use of simulators other than buy a whole bunch of them.
23:18
Josh Harnigle
I would appreciate that. Yeah, that'd be great.
23:19
Bobby Doss
On what we can do to incorporate simulator training into our training programs, both and proficiency. So if I'm just a pilot, what should I do to use it more for profit?
23:30
Josh Harnigle
Yeah. So on a proficiency side there, that's been a focus of ours for a while and we do have some, you know, software products and stuff that are available for it. They're not required. Right. You can get in a SIM by yourself, even depending on the flight school and way it's set up and use that time to build proficiency. And so from a legal perspective, if you're instrument rated and you are inside of your currency window, you can do your six approaches and hold in the SIM without an instructor and be current, you can re up your currency. So that's kind of the sort of low hanging fruit. But I would encourage people to kind of go beyond that.
24:11
Josh Harnigle
And when you're really, if you are an active pilot, the sim really ought to be more like the United flight sim, the United Airlines flight sim center where you're pushing yourself both from a system side like electrical failures, vacuum failures, whatever the situation might be, but also from a weather side. So a VFR pilot who's not instrument rated get a double eye to show you how to load an approach, get you out of a really bad situation. If it comes to it, that kind of stuff is, I think, super effective. And, you know, a couple hours every couple months would be more than enough. And you'd be way ahead of the curve of most pilots because, you know, most, you know, I fall into this. You get used to a mission profile.
25:04
Josh Harnigle
You know, I recently did an ipc, and the going back to shooting approaches back to back without an out, literally an hour to get ready for it was a big change. You know, I mean, and. And most of the time, it doesn't count, except for when I shoot and approach someplace and I go missed, and I don't want to go back there. I want to go to a different airport. That's when that would count and that would, you know, I might have my family on board. I want to be really sharp for that.
25:31
Bobby Doss
I don't know if I've shared this idea with you, but in the past, one of my hobbies is golf. And I've always thought about creating a sim tournament. Right. That people could sign up for maybe three or four very difficult challenges. Those challenges could be graded based on foreflight track logs because we can connect to the Corvus system in our Redbird and see all that four flights here. So they're going to talk about Cloud Ahoy, which will actually automatically grade your maneuvers. And we could have a contest on how. Well, I'm never going to do a landing contest in my real planes, but maybe we'll do a landing spot contest in my simulator. But something like that. I think schools, individuals should try to challenge themselves to incorporate it more in their profession. Efficiency in their currency.
26:13
Josh Harnigle
Yeah.
26:14
Bobby Doss
So we.
26:14
Josh Harnigle
We've actually built some stuff to do. So a nyfa, which is the Collegiate Aviation Program, uses a Redbird sim in a very similar challenge. That's a navigation challenge. And then actually in early migrations, back in the old days, we did a challenge here where people got in the sim and attempted different, you know, landing at Johnson or Johnson Creek in Idaho, and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's. It's definitely effective.
26:41
Bobby Doss
We do a lot of Boy Scout events, and we always take off from San Diego, and I let the Boy Scouts try to land on the aircraft carrier. They feel like they're Top Gun. That's a very difficult thing to do in a Cessna 172. We let them try to do it, and they probably never forget that experience.
26:53
Josh Harnigle
When they land, if they land, have them taxi back and try to take off.
26:57
Bobby Doss
That's probably doable. In 172. Any questions from. We have about 25 people in the room here, the. That you'd like to ask two podcasters or the vice president of Redbird.
27:10
Josh Harnigle
Yeah.
27:11
Bobby Doss
Why is Pilot Edge not talked about more?
27:13
Josh Harnigle
Yeah.
27:15
Bobby Doss
Repeat this question too.
27:16
Wally Mulhern
You want the full integration as a.
27:18
Josh Harnigle
Tool of flight schools. Yeah. So the question is, why isn't Pilot Edge talked about more? It is so little background. If you're not familiar, Pilot Edge is an ATC service, an air traffic control service. Then they have actual air traffic controllers that on their off time, basically serve as ATC for Sims. And so there's a sort of SIM enthusiast home sim version of that called vatsim, which depending on controllers can be. Okay. Pilot Edge is a paid service that's employing actual air traffic controllers. I think it's an awesome service in specific parts of the training, like your instrument rating and. Yeah. Departure procedures, ODPs, all kinds of stuff could be really useful. There's a couple of limitations. It can be integrated with Redbird sim. We do it relatively frequently.
28:18
Josh Harnigle
They have some geographic limitations and some time limitations, like hours that you can use them. And I will say probably the biggest complaint that we hear about from our customers is that is the geographic limitations. They want to be able to have ATC for their area, which, I mean, in theory, ATC works everywhere. They include Southern California, which is extremely complicated airspace. And there's nothing you're going to get anywhere in the country that's going to be worse than that. But yeah, I think it's a great service.
28:52
Bobby Doss
If the controller's talking to you around Gundry.
28:55
Wally Mulhern
Oh, you can.
29:00
Josh Harnigle
Yeah, yeah. And. And I. And part of it's probably a symptom of this kind of a general lack of creativity when it comes to the sim. I mean, it's on the same thread as why don't people do pattern entries in the sim? Right, right. And it's. And I will also say that CFIs tend to be terrible controllers. Like when. If you're trying to. I'm going to be atc, it very rarely is actually acc. So, yeah, I think it's a good.
29:35
Bobby Doss
I saw some other hands. Any other.
29:37
Wally Mulhern
Yes, ma'.
29:37
Josh Harnigle
Am. So the question is, in the sim, there are limits around the amount of time you can log towards a certificate, depending on part 61, 141, et cetera. But is there any limits around logging it as ground training? And there's not any time you spend in the SIM can be logged as ground training. The real rub is that depending on if you're 141, there may be requirements for Ground training, but those are probably explicitly listed in a TCO in a Part 61 environment, there's not a requirement for that, so you can definitely log it. And there's probably a psychological benefit for the students. But from a, you know, filling out a 8710 and getting a check. Right. It doesn't really add much in that perspective. But it is totally legal.
30:39
Bobby Doss
No, she. And she said she could fail things in there. And the systems work is amazing. And I. I say this all the time. Every day at the flight school, I'm walking around, someone's struggling, or I know they're at a hurdle that they can't overcome. It's never about the yoke, the rudder pedals, or the way they move the throttle. It's always something else. It's a capability. It's a knowing how systems work. It's a how do I enter the traffic pattern? And so what does this weather system mean to me? Which ways should the winds be blowing? It's always other stuff. It's never about flying. But kids will take their parents $500 bill and go fly my planes. And I tell them all the time, all you're doing is buying my wife another pair of black shoes that she does not need.
31:19
Bobby Doss
She does not need those black shoes.
31:23
Josh Harnigle
I'll say on the systems failure thing, a thing I'm kind of toying with right now is bird strikes, because they're so.
31:30
Bobby Doss
I hate birds.
31:31
Josh Harnigle
Yeah. Quite prevalent. And my. My lo fi. My method of simulating it is just banging the side of the sim and briefing the student beforehand. This is. Unless I get out of my seat there, this is a flight. You're flying this all the way to the ground, and so you can put them on an approach or something and literally bang on the wall of the sim, say, what was that? What's going on? And trying to try to distract them, you know. No, you. You're still flying this airplane. You got to get it on the ground.
32:01
Bobby Doss
That's a good. That's a good tip, because I'll take a seat belt extender next time I go, because I've actually had a seat belt hanging out of the door before on their side. Not my side, their side. And that'll scare you to death on that. That's. You think you got a real problem. So maybe we'll do that too, and simulate that outside the plane. Any other questions?
32:20
Wally Mulhern
Challenging approaches or something like that.
32:22
Bobby Doss
That would be helpful for instrument students.
32:24
Josh Harnigle
Yeah. So the question is, you know, one of the main benefits is flying challenging approaches. That are not in your local area. And do we have a package for that? So we have through a product called Redbird Pro, which is a proficiency program. There are approaches in there that are uniquely challenging. There's one in Nashville where you're on a DME arc, and if you happen to not intercept the final approach course, there's a mountain right there in front of you. And so that is available. And then there's also, I think in the. I have to look in the scenario store, there's some scenarios that were built for the Pilot Proficiency center in Oshkosh that are really built around unique approaches. The other thing I'd say along that same line of instrument procedures is the departure procedures or an odp.
33:19
Josh Harnigle
It's not really about flying it necessarily. It's about keying the student up to think about the fact that they need 700ft per nautical mile of climb performance out of a 172 in Scottsdale, Arizona, at 120 degrees. At 120 degrees, there's literally out of Deer Valley. There's a big hill at the end of the main Runway. And if you actually look at the odp, it is significant. The climb gradient is significant and would take some thought to how you would do that in. In the real world.
33:50
Bobby Doss
And quite literally flying at sea level all the time. I don't think about that stuff very much. I did a lot in my vision jet training when they put me in Aspen and it was 90 degrees, which is unrealistic, but it does. It does change your perspective on. On what you need to be able to do to get out of there for sure. Any other questions before we wrap up the show? All right, well, Josh, thanks for having us at Migration. Thanks to all the people that came to watch the show or listen to the show and all those people around the world that are going to hear the show in a few days. As always, thanks for listening and stay behind the prop.
34:25
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@brave.theprop.com behind the prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss. Co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember, fly safe.