# How to Best Prepare for a Flying Lesson URL: https://aussiepilotguide.com/blog/prepare-for-flight-lesson/ Published: 2026-05-23 Updated: 2026-06-20 Authors: Jeremy Browne Flight lessons are short, dense, and expensive. The groundwork you do beforehand is what makes each one count. Here is a practical framework for arriving at the airfield ready to fly. Flying lessons are short, dense, and expensive. The ground work you do beforehand is what lets you get full value out of each one. With the right framework, twenty or thirty minutes of preparation the night before makes the flight itself feel less rushed, the workload more manageable, and the new material easier to absorb. The aim of this article is to walk you through that framework. The cockpit is a tricky place to learn brand new concepts. Between holding wings level, talking on the radio, watching for traffic and managing the aircraft, there isn't much spare bandwidth for absorbing a procedure you've never seen before. Your instructor's airborne job is to coach the technique. Building the underlying knowledge is best done on the ground, where it's quiet, unhurried and free. Know the lesson When your instructor books you in for a lesson, they've picked it from the syllabus for a reason. Either you're moving on to the next item, or there's something from last time that benefits from another look. Either way, knowing in advance what's coming up makes a real difference to how the lesson goes. If your school issues briefing notes, study guides or pre-reading, that material is the best place to start. It's been written specifically to set you up for the lesson, and twenty minutes with it the night before tends to be time very well spent. Likewise, if the lesson references chapters in Bob Tait, the Flight Training Manual, or your school's house notes, those are worth a read. For manoeuvre lessons, focus on the order of actions, the relevant speeds, the lookout requirements, and any pre-manoeuvre checks like HASELL. It's also worth opening your training file and looking back at the previous lesson's debrief. The work-ons your instructor flagged last time are likely to come up again, and those are good items to focus on at home. If you're not sure what's on the lesson plan, just ask. A quick text or call the day before is perfectly fine. Most instructors are happy to point you at the right material; we'd much rather you arrive ready to work than have to spend the first thirty minutes of the lesson catching you up. Know the objective Related but distinct: every lesson has an objective. Not just "fly the aeroplane today" but a specific competency the lesson is built around. Steep turns to a standard. A circuit pattern that's stable from base to touchdown. Recognising and recovering from an incipient stall without losing two hundred feet. The objective tells you what success looks like, what your instructor will be assessing, and what to rehearse in the chair the night before. It's the single most useful piece of information you can have going into the lesson. It also helps to bring the objective into the pre-flight briefing in your own words. Something like "I'd like to focus on getting the aim point consistent on every approach today" or "the entry to slow flight felt rushed last time; I want to get it smooth." That kind of statement turns the brief into a conversation and gives your instructor a useful steer on where to focus their coaching. If you don't know the objective for your next lesson, ask before you leave the school after the current one. You'll then have all week to prepare for it properly. Practise on the ground Chair flying is one of the most useful tools available to a student pilot, and it costs nothing. The idea is simple: sit in a quiet spot at home with a checklist or a cockpit photo in front of you, and run the lesson sequence in real time. Hands on imaginary controls. Radio calls out loud. Checks spoken aloud. Eyes scanning where they'd scan in the air. It works because the brain doesn't draw a sharp line between vividly imagined movement and real movement. Mental rehearsal builds the same neural pathways as the physical thing, just more cheaply. The sport-psychology literature has supported this for thirty years, and the technique is used everywhere from Blue Angels demo briefings to airline type conversions to aerobatic warmups. It's not theatre; it's just deliberate practice. Ten to fifteen minutes the night before is plenty for a normal lesson. Pick the parts that matter most: the takeoff brief, the entry to whatever new manoeuvre you're learning, the engine failure after takeoff response, the downwind checks, the landing flare picture. Run them in real time, not at speed. A circuit that takes seven minutes in the air should take seven minutes in your chair. Two things to keep in mind. First, only rehearse the correct version. If a manoeuvre didn't go to plan last lesson, have a quick chat with your instructor to confirm the right sequence before you drill it at home; otherwise there's a risk of cementing the wrong pattern. Second, stop when concentration drifts. Short and accurate beats long and muddled. A note for those who don't visualise strongly: some people don't form mental images at all, and that's perfectly fine. The technique still works if you speak the actions out loud and physically move your hands and feet. The benefit comes from the rehearsal itself, not from how vivid the picture is. IMSAFE IMSAFE is the standard pre-flight self check for fitness to fly. It takes about thirty seconds, and the best time to run it is at home before you set off for the airfield. Each letter is a category to think through honestly: Illness. Anything affecting your breathing, hearing or balance is worth taking seriously. Head colds tend to bite hardest in the descent when sinuses can't equalise. A useful rule of thumb: if you wouldn't head to work today, the lesson probably isn't the day for it either. Medication. A surprising number of common over-the-counter and prescription medications aren't compatible with flying, particularly sedating antihistamines and anything containing codeine. If you've started something new since your last flight, it's worth checking. Your DAME, or CASA's drugs and flying guidance, is the right place to confirm. Stress. Significant life stress — a work crisis, a family issue, financial pressure — takes up brain capacity that you need for the lesson. It's a sensible reason to rebook, and converting the slot to ground theory is often a good use of the time. Alcohol. Eight hours bottle to throttle is the legal minimum. Most instructors recommend twenty-four hours dry before a training flight, because hangovers degrade performance well before they show on a breath test. Fatigue. Aim for a normal night's sleep before a lesson. Less than six hours, or several short nights in a row, is a signal that the lesson will be hard work and the learning won't stick. Caffeine masks the symptoms but doesn't fix them. Better to reschedule than to fly tired. Eating and emotion. A familiar, light meal an hour or two before the lesson keeps your blood sugar steady. Strong emotion, like fatigue, eats into the bandwidth available for flying. Both are worth pausing for. The value of IMSAFE is in actually using it. If one of the letters lights up for you, talk to your instructor. Converting the slot to ground theory or rescheduling is a professional decision, not a failure, and your instructor would much rather know about it than have you push through a flight you can't get full value from. Weather We've covered the full weather briefing checklist in Going flying VFR under Part 91: Equipment and Weather, so I won't repeat it here. From a lesson preparation point of view, three things are worth knowing. Form an initial impression the night before from the GAF on NAIPS or the BoM's MetEye. That gives you a feel for whether the morning is likely to be flyable, and lets you and your instructor talk early about a Plan B if it isn't. Pull the actual TAFs, METARs, area forecast, grid point winds, AIRMETs, SIGMETs and NOTAMs no more than an hour before engine start. Part 91 MOS 7.02 makes the one-hour rule a regulatory requirement, so getting into the habit early is sensible. Decide your no-go criteria before you leave the house. Pre-deciding the line at home, when you're calm and unhurried, is much easier than trying to make the call in the run-up bay with the schedule pressure of the day on you. If the weather is marginal and you're early in your training, converting the booking to ground theory with your instructor is usually the highest value move on offer. A cancelled flight is still training: in weather decision making, in pre-deciding the things that need to be pre-decided, and in resisting the pressure to fly when conditions don't suit. Putting it all together Preparation doesn't need to be heavy. Read the lesson plan. Be clear on the objective. Spend ten or fifteen minutes chair flying the new sequence. Run IMSAFE before you set off. Check the weather properly. That's the framework. Twenty or thirty minutes the night before, plus a final weather check in the morning, and you'll arrive at the school ready to fly the lesson you've already flown in your head. That's what makes the hour count.