Becoming a French Pilot - blog

“I’m told that a typical French PPL flies about 20 hours/year.”
I think you.would need to add “club” and “certified aircraft” to this ie the typical French Club PPL flies around 20hrs/year.
Looking at SMILE and FFA reports I would estimate it more at 13hrs/year.
However, you average certified owner, your average annexe 1 owner and your average ULM pilot is usually doing a lot many more hours.
If you read RSA and FFPLUM reports it looks more like 30 to 40 hours a year.
Italy and Croatia have become favourite destinations for the French ULM scene as can be seen on You Tube.
I’ve been particularly interested in a series of videos of Super Guépard trip out of Fréjus and touring through the Italian Alps and down to Venice
This year our club ULM hours is going to well outstrip the number of hours flown in the club certified aircraft for the first time.
The times they are a changing🙂

Back to the article, and aside from the sideslip debate, the “encadrement” technique is quite interesting to me, for several reasons:

• It forces you to define how you’re going to land (visualize a runway and a direction instead of just going to some field)
• It uses simple, objective visual cues that are pretty much independent of terrain (no illusion of being too high / too low because you don’t know the area). As it’s been said though they do depend on your plane (especially if the wing is used as a reference).
• It makes a simple reflex procedure out of a forced landing, which greatly helps streamlining the process and potentially avoids the stress of having to choose what to do. Once you’ve chosen your field, you just the procedure and (hopefully) you’re good.
• Finally, it keeps you permanently in a position with some flexibility to manoeuver either way (a sideslip can make you lose altitude but can’t get it back). When you’re doing the circling around, you can extend slightly your approach if you’re too high, or shorten it if you’re too low. Potentially it avoids bad estimations that make you land too short or too long and hit a fence at the end.

But it’s definitely NOT made for engine failure after takeoff. You need to be about 1000ft directly above your landing spot in order to execute it properly. It’s made for engine failure in cruise instead, where you have one minute or more to plan your landing, approach the spot and circle around.

As for learning with stopwatch / map / navlog, it’s simply because some aircrafts don’t have anything else, some pilots like it that way, and most VFR aircrafts navigation equipment is not redundant enough to be reliable (let alone iPads etc.). The exam simply makes sure you’re able to use what you MUST legally carry to not get lost too easily. It really makes sense IMO that FIs teach you this and the PPL exam checks for it. It doesn’t mean you have to use it always to navigate.