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Student Pilot Cross Country

Asked by: 1204 views Flight Instructor

I recently became a CFI and I’m just wondering if you guys teach student pilots to calculate a TOC and TOD or would it be better to wait until commercial to teach them that?

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1 Answers

  1. Best Answer


    Russ Roslewski on Mar 02, 2022

    If you don’t calculate a TOC, how do you know how long you’re going to be in cruise to therefore calculate fuel usage?

    If you don’t calculate a TOD, how do you know when to descend?

    Granted, in “real life” flying I typically don’t bother calculating a TOC because real-world it doesn’t usually make a whole lot of difference. But the student needs to know how to do it for flight planning.

    But a TOD I calculate, in some fashion, every single flight. Now, it’s often just a rough estimate (“I need to lose 5000 feet, so I need to start down 10 minutes out, and at 120 knots that’s 20 nm.”) but the concept is extremely important so you don’t end up at your destination thousands of feet too high, diving to get down, or alternately get down to pattern altitude dozens of miles early and bounce around at low altitude forever.

    “Hey look, there’s the airport, let’s start on down” may work okay in a 172 cruising at 2000 AGL, but in anything faster or higher or slipperier or with sensitive engines, it’s not going to work too well.

    Build the fundamentals from the beginning.

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