Better Patter

Purdue Professor Everett Lowell Kelly knew how to fly and how to teach (clinical psychology). He also knew that not every good flyer is a good flight instructor. This knowledge served him well when the Civil Aeronautics Administration asked him to direct a project for working out a better technique for basic flight instruction.

Practical-minded Professor Kelly began on the ground. He used an electrical inter phone and radio transmitter to listen to scores of teacher-pupil conversations in the air. He analyzed the results and found no instruction "which might be said to be both complete and correct." Four instructors used 500 technical terms, of which only 70 were common to all four. One used 265 terms which were never used by the other three. Among them, they used 14 different expressions to instruct students to increase and 20 to reduce power, 33 for turns, 18 for describing control motions.

Feet on the Ground. Kelly, who is now a Navy lieutenant commander, decided to teach on the ground a good deal of what had been taught in the air. Some 60 maneuver sheets were developed to give the essentials of each maneuver in simple, nontechnical language. Instructors got a manual which set forth the best teaching vocabulary. Last week the Navy was making good use of an adaptation of the manual, U.S. Navy Patter. Says Patter:

"Students may be dumb--some of them are. But what seems to be dumbness may be something else. If your instructions were not clear to the student, he is not to blame for doing something the 'dumb' way. Again, you can't expect him to remember a hundred things if he has heard each of them just once. Many a student will act much brighter if told fewer things and exposed to these more often."

Barred from Navy teaching is "gun" for throttle, "flipper" for elevator, many another loose expression. With instruction based on Patter, students can--and often are--passed from one teacher to another with no risk of confusion from linguistic individualism. Said one student pilot: "Patter is a great idea. The instructors talk more like each other now. They still swear alike, too, when you err."

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