One of the problems with SIV is that there is very little regulation. Anybody can set themselves up as an instructor, and that means there’s a massive difference in quality. Every instructor brings their own experiences and their own way of teaching, which is great, but without any real structure or minimum standard it can also lead to some pretty disastrous teaching.
I do think the culture is changing. There’s a lot more knowledge available now, and SIV is becoming much more accepted. More and more pilots see it as something they need to do rather than something they might do one day. That’s a really positive change. The downside is that badly run courses are still creating horror stories that put people off before they’ve even had the chance to experience a good course.
For me, a good SIV isn’t about throwing people in at the deep end. It’s about building things step by step. It’s very easy to push someone past their limits. Sometimes they come out the other side with more confidence than knowledge because they’ve survived it, but they haven’t really understood what happened. The next time they find themselves in that situation, the outcome could be very different.
More often than not, I find myself undoing fears from previous SIV courses. Pilots have been pushed into nose-down spirals, they’ve experienced all that power for the first time, but nobody has shown them how to manage it or regulate it. Instead of building confidence through understanding, they’ve simply been overwhelmed by the experience.
Those are the little instructional details that make a huge difference. It’s the difference between somebody feeling in control and becoming confident, or somebody feeling completely out of control and deciding they never want to do another SIV again. Small changes in the way you teach can be the difference between installing confidence and installing fear.
I don’t think there’s a shortcut to that. Good instruction is about understanding where the pilot is today, taking them one step at a time and making sure every exercise builds on the last one. When that happens, pilots don’t just complete the course. They leave understanding what they’ve done, why they’ve done it and with the confidence to keep progressing afterwards.