One of the easiest ways to explain how I teach is to describe a typical SIV course.
On the same course I might have someone with five or ten hours after qualifying, someone flying a modern two-liner who’s trying to perfect their stalls, and another pilot who’s returning for their second, third or even fourth SIV.
They’re all on the same course, but they’re not doing the same course.
The pilot with five or ten hours has so much to learn before we even start talking about the safety side of SIV. At that stage, I’m much more interested in helping them understand how the wing moves, how the body moves with it, and how those two things influence each other. We spend time understanding rotations, roll, exits and the movements of the wing because those are the things they’ll meet every time they start flying in thermic conditions. Once those movements become familiar, we build on the fundamentals before moving on to collapses and anything more advanced.
On that very same flight I might have someone flying a modern two-liner. Our conversations are completely different. We’re looking at the finer details of stall technique, how modern wings behave and the small changes that make a big difference on higher-performance gliders. The techniques that worked fifteen years ago have evolved because the wings have evolved, so the coaching has to evolve with them.
Then I’ll have someone returning for another SIV.
The hardest SIV you’ll ever do is normally the first one because there’s so much fear of the unknown. You don’t know the rhythm of the day, you don’t know what’s coming next and you’re trying to process a huge amount of information all at once. When you come back for your second or third course, you’ve freed up that mental bandwidth. Instead of simply keeping up with what’s happening, you can start concentrating on the details. That’s when I really start to see competent pilots emerge.
For some returning pilots, the next step is becoming more dynamic. For others it might be spin-to-stall, dynamic stalls or refining their autorotation recoveries. There isn’t one progression that fits everybody because everybody arrives with different strengths, different weaknesses and different goals.
That’s why I don’t give one group briefing and expect everybody to progress together.
It does happen occasionally that I get a group at exactly the same level, but it’s rare. Most of the time I have complete beginners alongside very experienced pilots, and every one of them needs something different. My job is to work out where each pilot is today and what they need next, not where the rest of the group is.
If you’re a blank slate, that’s brilliant because we can build one skill on top of the next in a logical order. If you’ve had a bad experience, though, we might spend the course rebuilding confidence and undoing previous fears. Sometimes that’s far more valuable than learning another manoeuvre because confidence unlocks progression. A pilot who’s completely confident will continue learning long after the course has finished, whereas a pilot who’s still carrying fear is far more likely to hold themselves back.
That’s why I see every SIV course as an individual course, even when we’re flying as a group. The boats, the radios and the timetable are shared, but the coaching isn’t. Every pilot gets the coaching they need, at the level they’re ready for, because that’s how real progression happens.