How many hours per day do you practice?

"How To" by our Pilot Staff
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Lawndart
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How many hours per day do you practice?

Post by Lawndart » Sun Oct 29, 2006 3:05 am

To answer that question, you have to look at the pieces that are part of the entire demo. Stick and rudder skills is the first that comes to everyone's mind, but within and throughout an entire air show demo lies much, much more than motor skills alone.

I'm not going to write a long-winded response to this question that gets asked quite often when people new to aerobatics show up, but here's a copy of a response I wrote to a question similar to this one in the 9th Air Force's forums. Here is the thread.
At 9th Air Force's forum, Lawndart wrote:It's not so much how many hours/per day we practice anymore, but just keeping current. It's taken quite a long time to learn the procedures, comms, callouts, show timing, turnarounds and stick and rudder skills for every varying formation and maneuver as well as unique positions. Once most of this is mastered to an extent by the entire team (we're only as strong as our weakest link), then it's like riding a bike. You never forget, but unless you do it continuously, you're never going to be as sharp as the guys riding the one-wheelers at the circus. So, to sum up it's taken the team several hundred hours if not more per person and position to become proficient, but only takes us a few hours nowadays to get back in the saddle.

We've had intense months before where we flew 4-5 times per week for 2-3 hours each time as a team and with some individual practice in between as well. On top of that, procedural knowledge and learning takes place in greater extent both in time and effort than the flying itself. We debrief every sortie heavily, looking for the smallest deviations and try to fix those the next time. It's tough and it is never perfect (ever!), but when you can almost reach out and touch that perfection, yet fall short by a little it's worth it! Right now, we're hardly flying at all and we're doing a LIVE show in only a few weeks. We'll gear up for that the week of likely and iron out the wrinkles, rust and new procedures. The team already has both the cognitive skills and disciplined hands to be able to perform it given some warm-up. It wasn't always like that, and it's getting to that point that is the greatest accomplishment.

Going to Nellis AFB last year was a blast, but it's about to be obliterated by the agenda we have for this year out there. Always good to have great contacts! ...and while we understand it can only be afforded a few, we're not about raising ourselves above anyone else. That's why we'd like to share as much as we can with the rest of the community and hopefully everyone can be happy for us, but also because we try and work really hard at making more people than ourselves be part of the ride and offer an equal opportunity to try out and even be part of our team. Hopefully, we'll get to meet some of ya'll in Las Vegas this time around?

...and the movie. Yup, it's pushing the HOUR mark isn't it! ;)

...and it won't just be boring either, it contains several hundred clips of footage and an astounding amount of sound, video and additional FX. But, the coolest thing for us is to be able to show the ENTIRE demo from start to finish, just like you would see it in real life, only this time it's pixilated!

Cheers!
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