RIGHT SEAT RULES NO. 7 - BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

So far we have been gathering the tools you’ll need to be the best damn instructor around.

FIRST, A REMINDER OF WHAT you have already got, and then I will show you how to put it together in such a way that future airline captains and astronauts will brag, in hushed tones of course, that they have your name in their logbooks.

So here's a slightly random summary of the tools you have at the moment:

• A lecture-room full of the right stuff – projectors and so on.
• A head bursting with book knowledge, experience and enthusiasm.
• A working knowledge of the famous What Why How teaching technique.
• The habit of finding emotional glue to make things memorable – like the story of Scully’s spinning briefing from a few months ago.

Here’s the gist of the thing again: Scully was briefing half a dozen SAAF Harvard pupils before they were to do their first dual spins.

He had talked them through the HASELLL checks, throttling back the big, noisy radial, and easing the great rounded nose well above the horizon. He took his time to describe the smell of avgas, oil and exhaust smoke, and the way the aircraft felt as if it were balancing on a pinnacle as it started to shudder and rattle.

Then wham. Your bone-dome smacks into the side of the canopy and you get a moment's negative G as the nose swirls down and the dust rises from the floor and you feel a sickening lurch...

At this stage one of the pupes hurried from the classroom as he murmured Excuse me Sir, through fingers clamped over his mouth. He was violently sick on the grass.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a memorable briefing.

Don't wander off - we are still looking through that list of good stuff in the lecture room. High on the list are those magnetic models of aerofoils, aircraft, wind vectors and so on, that you should have made by now.