Private Pilot Flight Training and Instruction Flight Training Article Library | Back To 4VFR.COM Instructional Safety When teaching the safest possible flight operations you can show a student how poor decisions doing the same maneuvers could be proportionately more dangerous. I do this almost without thinking about it in my home flight arena. In a low visibility situation today I chose to get all the radar help I could by getting an IFR clearance for practice work in the vicinity of a VOR. With the next student we did vertical-S airspeed practice. I had the student depart by requesting a climb in pattern to above a cloud layer before flying to the VOR. We then tracked upwind on a radial that I knew would be relatively safe and then tracked crosswind for a period before returning downwind on another radial over an under cast that was most likely to be avoided. The fact that we never saw an airplane doesn't mean anything for certain but it was a nice flight. I began instruction in 1968 and I lay some credit to the fact that instructional accidents have fallen nearly every year up to the present. At least I have not contributed to the accident rate. Written by Gene Whitt Flight Training Article Library | Back To 4VFR.COM