"smpharmanaut" wrote in message
.51...
mandatory continuing education for pilot license.

After I'd been flying for awhile, I began to notice a disturbing decline in
the proportion of my time spent looking outside (flying VFR). In retrospect,
it's easy to see how that could happen: there's no overt feedback to remind
you that you're doing something wrong when your eyes linger inside the
cockpit, so a bad habit of neglecting the exterior scan can easily creep up
on you.

I made a conscious effort to monitor and correct the problem. But I wonder
what other bad habits might develop unnoticed. I suspect that recurrent
training every two years is inadequate to catch such problems in a timely
manner.

One possibility, of course, is to fly with an instructor (or at least
another pilot) far more often. Another would be to compile an list of bad
habits that can develop in the absence of corrective feedback, and
explicitly monitor for them. Or perhaps it'd be beneficial to videotape
oneself while flying, and review the tape afterwards (perhaps showing
representative portions to an instructor) to watch for any lapses.

--Gary