Cessnas 2 Oshkosh Training Webinar

We are doing a webinar on Wednesday, April 14th at 8:00 PM EDT for formation flight training clinic host, lead and safety pilots. The main goal of this meeting is to reinforce the principle of standardization of the training of pilots participating in the Cessnas 2 Oshkosh Mass Arrival into AirVenture on Saturday, July 24th at 2:30 PM CDT. The webinar will last approximately 2 hours.

The growth of our roster of pilots and the geographic spread of our pilot base has made it impossible for our organizers and lead pilots to travel to every home base airport to organize and supervise every clinic. We are experiencing the natural growing pains that every successful organization goes through during the growth process. This webinar, and the ones that will follow, may not be the only and definitive solution, but it is a very good start. We want to convey to each one of you and to all our pilots that safety is our main concern and that we are serious about managing the intrinsic risk that formation flying carries. We want our formation flight and arrival to be a great fun-filled flying experience, free of worries for our pilots and their families.

We will start the meeting with a brief introduction of the program and the interactive process by Gil Velez, immediately followed by a presentation by our Director of Training and Operations. Rodney will review the most important points of the training slide presentation and provide tips on how best to communicate the information to the trainees during local clinics. Every few slides he will pause to take questions from the audience and for participants to share their own experience. Needless to say, we want this process to be as interactive as possible, and expect participants to prepare for the meeting ahead of time. We are not going to lecture the audience.

Some of the topics that participants in the meeting should expect are: organization and hosting of a clinic, recruitment of safety pilots, the practice flight briefing and debriefing, safety concerns such as runway width, communication among pilots in a formation flight and between flight leads and ATC, and whatever topic participants bring to the table.