One of the biggest differences in the way I teach SIV is that I’m pilot-focused, not manoeuvre-focused. For me, the manoeuvre is a by-product of how you are as a pilot. If we build the right foundations, the manoeuvres become much easier because you understand what’s happening rather than simply copying a sequence of control inputs.
It’s very easy to look at SIV as a list of manoeuvres that need ticking off. You go away, do collapses, spirals, stalls and a few more advanced exercises, and by the end of the course you’ve technically completed everything. The problem is that completing a manoeuvre doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve learned anything from it. I regularly see pilots who have done every manoeuvre but are still missing some very basic piloting skills. They’ve experienced the manoeuvres, but they haven’t really become the pilot in command.
That’s why I spend far more time looking at the skills behind each exercise than the exercise itself. If you’re not using your full brake range and we simply add more power, you’ll start getting frontals. By the time you’re learning stalls, you shouldn’t still be getting frontals on the exit. If you are, then there’s no point carrying on with stalls. We need to step back and work on your catch and release until that part is completely natural.
The same thing happens with rotations. If you’re exiting every rotation weakly, I don’t just tell you to try harder. We’ll work on spiral regulation, natural exits, rapid exits and the whole rotational family until you really understand what’s happening. Then, if you unexpectedly find yourself in an autorotation later on, you’ll already have the understanding and confidence to deal with it.
That’s why I rarely look at one manoeuvre in isolation. Every exercise tells me something about the way you fly. If an undesirable characteristic appears during one manoeuvre, we can often use a completely different exercise to develop the underlying skill that’s missing. It isn’t about getting through a programme in a fixed order. It’s about recognising the skills you need and building them one by one.
Most pilots arrive with an idea of what they want to achieve. They might want to master stalls, improve their collapses or start flying higher-performance wings. Those are good goals, but my job is to identify the skills that sit underneath those goals. Once we’ve built those skills, the manoeuvre usually follows naturally because you understand the situation, you have the brake range, you have the body position and you know how the wing is moving.
For me, that’s what progression really means. It’s not about collecting manoeuvres or being able to say you’ve completed another SIV course. It’s about becoming the sort of pilot who understands what’s happening, makes good decisions and stays ahead of the wing instead of reacting to it.
The manoeuvre isn’t the goal.
The goal is to become a better pilot, because once that happens, the manoeuvres become the easy part.