01
Principles of flight
Why a wing works, and why almost every explanation your child has already heard is wrong. Lift, drag, the polar curve, stall and the reason a stall has nothing to do with speed.
Flight Theory · Grades 5 to 12
Seven real systems.
One sky.
Eight years.
Flight, taught by someone who has built the systems that leave the atmosphere entirely. Personally, every class, one student at a time.
Reads your phone's own attitude, and the real horizon from where you are standing.
7systems, opened every year, not aerodynamics alone
1:1live on Zoom, taught personally by a rocket engineer
8years, three stages, one plan from Grade 5 to Grade 12
15students in the practice, in total. Never a group. Never a stand in.
01 The years nobody uses
A child who wants to fly is told, for years, to wait.
Sixteen for a student certificate. Seventeen for the licence itself, in America, in Britain and across Europe. A ten year old who has decided, completely and without negotiation, that they are going to fly is being asked to hold that decision for seven years with nothing to do about it.
So the waiting becomes what waiting usually becomes. A thousand hours in a flight simulator. Four hundred videos. A shelf of aeroplane books read three times each. And a parent who cannot tell, from the outside, whether they are watching the beginning of a career or the middle of a phase.
Those years are the most useful years the child will ever have, and almost nobody uses them. A teenager will work through partial pressures, standard atmosphere models and lift equations without complaining once, because they are not doing physics. They are working out whether the aeroplane leaves the runway. That is the most efficient teaching material I have ever found, and I have taught orbital mechanics to eleven year olds.
The students who come to me for this are rarely behind. They are usually ahead, and bored, and looking for something that will not condescend to them.
Give a curious child a real system and they will teach themselves the mathematics to understand it.
Abhishek Dabas · MSc Astronautics and Space Engineering · BEng Aerospace Engineering
02 Where it all points
Everything on this page is aimed at one seat, and one moment.
Two hundred feet above the ground on a three degree slope, in cloud, with the runway five hundred and fifty metres of visibility away. The aeroplane is descending at about seven hundred feet a minute and it will not stop doing that while anybody thinks it over.
At that moment a pilot is holding perhaps nine things at once. What the instruments say. What the instruments would say if one of them had quietly failed. What the wind is doing to the track. How much fuel is left and what that permits. What the alternate airfield looks like right now. Whether the last twenty seconds felt stable or merely survivable. And underneath all of it, whether they are tired enough that they should not trust their own judgement.
None of that is learned in the aeroplane. It is learned years earlier, on the ground, by a person who understood the systems so thoroughly that the understanding had time to become instinct. That is the whole argument of this programme, and it is the reason it starts in Grade 5 rather than at seventeen.
Glideslope 3.0 degrees Decision height 200 ft Visibility 550 m Time to decide about 30 s
03 The seven systems
Flight is not one subject. It is seven, and your child meets all of them every year.
Aerodynamics is what most people mean when they say they want to learn about flying. It is one of seven here, and on its own it explains almost nothing about why a flight goes well or badly.
02
Aircraft systems
Piston and turbine engines, fuel, electrics, hydraulics, pressurisation, ice protection. What each one does when it works, and the specific way each one tells you it has stopped.
03
Flight instruments
Pressure instruments, gyroscopic instruments, the modern glass display. How each is built, what it is really measuring, and the errors it will hand you with total confidence.
04
Meteorology
The standard atmosphere, pressure systems, fronts, cloud, icing, thunderstorms, wind shear. Reading a real forecast and turning it into a decision rather than a description.
05
Performance and loading
Density altitude, takeoff and landing distance, weight and balance, centre of gravity limits. The arithmetic that decides whether today is a flying day. This one is on the page below.
06
Human performance
Hypoxia, fatigue, spatial disorientation, the illusions the inner ear produces in cloud, and the way a well trained person makes a bad decision. The system that fails most often is the one flying.
07
Air law and operations
Airspace, right of way, minimum altitudes, documents, and how an aviation rule is actually written. American and European rulebooks side by side, because the differences are where the reasoning shows.
All seven
And then together
Every term ends with a scenario that needs all seven at once, because that is the only form in which any of it is ever used. A weather brief, an aeroplane, a runway, and a decision to defend.
04 The eight year plan
One plan that starts in Grade 5 and ends with a student who could sit the examinations.
Three stages, eight years, seven systems in every one of them. Choose a stage and the whole map redraws itself at that depth.
Stage One · Air
The first stage is about the air itself. A student learns that the atmosphere is a fluid with a density, a pressure and a temperature that change with height, and that everything an aeroplane does is a consequence of that. They build wings out of paper and card and test them properly, with a control and a measurement and an uncertainty. Every one of the seven systems appears here in a form a ten year old can hold, so that the words aerodynamics and avionics stop being intimidating and start being interesting.
7systems, every year
1:1live on Zoom
1build and test per term
Stage Two · Systems
The middle stage converts interest into method. Algebra, ratio and trigonometry stop being schoolwork and become instruments: a student calculates a takeoff distance rather than guessing it, plots a weight and balance envelope rather than describing one, and learns that a number without a unit is not yet an answer. This is where a student meets a real forecast, a real performance chart and a real checklist, and finds out that professional documents are written to be used under pressure rather than read for pleasure.
7systems, in rotation
1:1live on Zoom
2full scenarios per term
Stage Three · Command
The final stage is taught at the level of the professional theory examinations, and maps cleanly onto the physics and mathematics a student is doing anyway for advanced placement or the international baccalaureate. The purpose is command: by graduation a student can take a forecast, an aeroplane, a load and a runway, produce a defensible decision, and then explain what would have to change for the decision to reverse. That is what the examinations actually test, and it is what the seat actually requires.
7systems, at depth
1:1live on Zoom
1capstone investigation
G5
G6
G7
G8
G9
G10
G11
G12
05 How it is actually taught
Will this aeroplane get off this runway today?
This is a real lesson, compressed. It is the one I use most often, because it takes about ninety seconds to convince a thirteen year old that arithmetic is the difference between an ordinary afternoon and an accident.
Same aeroplane. Same pilot. Same weight. Manchester in April, and it uses about nine hundred feet of tarmac and climbs away without comment. Phoenix in July, and the identical aeroplane needs roughly one and a half times that distance, climbs like it is tired, and clears the fence with far less to spare than anybody watching would guess.
Nothing about the aeroplane changed. What changed is the air. Density falls as you go up and it falls as the air gets hotter, and a wing does not care about your altimeter, only about how many molecules per second it can push down. The pilot's shorthand for this is density altitude: the height at which today's air would be standard air.
First, the two lines a student derives themselves.
DA ≈ PA + 120 × (OAT minus ISA)
ground roll ∝ 1 / σ2
Density altitude in feet, from pressure altitude and the difference between the actual and standard temperature. Then the ground roll, which goes as the inverse square of the density ratio, because the wing needs a fixed number of molecules and the engine and propeller are both losing thrust at the same time.
Argue with it yourself.
Three sliders and three thousand feet of runway. Everything on the right is derived from what you set on the left. Nothing here is decorative.
Move a slider.
A first order model of a light single, normalised to a sea level standard day at maximum weight. It is the model a student builds in the lesson, and it behaves exactly as the published charts behave. In a real aeroplane the chart in the handbook is always the authority, and a student learns why that sentence is not a formality.
1,100density altitude, feet
900ground roll required, feet
1.00xcompared with a sea level standard day
06 What comes out of it
Every term ends in a document a professional would recognise.
Not a worksheet and not a quiz score. Something with your child's reasoning written down in it, which is the only artefact that survives contact with a university admissions officer or an interview panel.
A weather brief
A real forecast for a real route on a real day, read properly, and a written recommendation with the reasoning attached. Including the days when the answer is that nobody is going anywhere.
A performance sheet
Weight and balance worked from a loading schedule, takeoff and landing distances from published charts, and the margins stated as numbers rather than as reassurance.
A systems teardown
One aircraft system taken apart on paper: what it does, how it fails, what the crew sees when it fails, and what the designers traded away to make it that simple.
And in Stage Three, one investigation.
A published accident report, read the way an investigator reads it. What the aeroplane did, what the crew understood, what the organisation had made normal, and where the chain could have been broken. Students who do this well never again describe a mistake as carelessness, which is a habit of mind worth having in any field they end up in.
07 The timing
The decision that gets made in Grade 9, quietly, by nobody in particular.
Around Grade 9 a student picks subjects, and those choices decide which university courses will accept them four years later. Almost every route into aviation and aerospace requires mathematics and physics carried to the end of school. A student who drops physics at fifteen because it was taught dryly for two years has closed a door they did not know was a door.
The students who keep physics are usually not the ones who found it easy. They are the ones who had a reason. This programme is a reason, and it arrives four years before the choice rather than four months after it.
There is a second effect, quieter and more valuable. A student who has spent three years defending decisions with numbers writes differently, argues differently and interviews differently. Selection panels for flight training and for engineering courses are both looking for exactly that, and both find it very hard to teach.
By the time it matters, the choice has already been made. The only question is whether anybody was paying attention when it happened.
08 Where this leads
Seven systems, and the seats at the end of them.
The flight deck is the obvious one. It is also the one with the most competition and the least tolerance for a late start. These are the others, and every one of them is opened by the same seven systems.
Flight deck
Airline, corporate, cargo, emergency medical, survey. The theory examinations sit between a candidate and the seat, and they reward a person who understood the material years earlier rather than one who memorised it in eight months.
Flight test
Engineers who fly the aeroplane in order to measure it, then write the numbers that end up in the handbook every pilot reads. Aerodynamics, instrumentation and statistics, in one job.
Aerospace design
Airframes, propulsion, avionics, certification. The people who decide what the aeroplane is allowed to do, several years before anybody is allowed to fly it.
Air traffic control
A profession built almost entirely on the two systems most people skip: airspace and human performance. Selection is early, difficult, and heavily weighted towards exactly this kind of thinking.
Aviation meteorology
Forecasting for aviation is its own discipline, with its own products and its own consequences. It sits on physics and on an unusually clear head about uncertainty.
Accident investigation
Reading a system backwards from its worst day. Engineering, physiology, organisational behaviour and very careful writing. Almost nobody enters it young, which is itself the opportunity.
Military aviation
Aircrew and engineering branches both select on aptitude tests that are, substantially, the seven systems on this page, delivered under time pressure.
Or none of them
Roughly half the students who take this will not work in aviation. They will still have spent eight years learning to hold a complex system in their head and defend a decision under conditions where being confident is not the same as being right. That transfers everywhere.
09 How it runs
Weekly, one to one, on your time zone, and written down afterwards.
Sixty minutes, live
One student, one teacher, on Zoom, at a time that suits a school week and a family. No recordings of somebody else's lesson, no cohort to keep pace with, no teaching assistant.
A written note
What was covered, what your child actually understood as opposed to what they said, and what to look for during the week. You are not left guessing whether progress is happening.
A rocket engineer
Abhishek Dabas, MSc Astronautics and Space Engineering, BEng Aerospace Engineering. Every class personally. A deliberately small practice, which is the reason that is possible.
Why the practice stays small.
Because this material cannot be delivered. It has to be argued with. A student who says the wing pushes air down needs to be asked why the aeroplane does not simply fall when the air runs out, and that question has to arrive within four seconds of the claim, from somebody who knows which of the four possible misunderstandings produced it. That does not scale, and I have stopped pretending it does.
10 Questions
The questions families actually ask.
Does my child need to want to be a pilot?
No, and about half do not. Most arrive because aeroplanes are the thing that reliably holds their attention, which is the only ingredient that matters. What they leave with is fluency in seven engineering and science systems and a habit of defending a decision with numbers. That is useful whichever direction they take.
What age does this start?
Grade 5. The material is real from the first lesson, but Stage One is pitched so that a ten year old can hold it in their hands. It then runs to Grade 12 as one continuous plan rather than as three unrelated courses. Students join later than Grade 5 regularly, and the assessment is how I work out where they should start.
Is this taught to American or European rules?
Both. The physics does not change at a border. Where the rulebooks differ, a student learns both versions and, more importantly, learns why they differ, which is a far better lesson than either one alone. Families in America, Britain, Europe, the Gulf and Australia are all served by the same eight year plan.
How much mathematics is involved?
Exactly as much as the aeroplane needs, introduced at the moment the aeroplane needs it. In practice students here do algebra, trigonometry and logarithms a year or two ahead of their school, and they do it without resistance, because the alternative is not knowing whether the aeroplane clears the fence.
My child is already ahead at school. Will this be too easy?
That is the usual case, and no. The material has no artificial ceiling: Stage Three sits at the level of professional theory examinations, and a student who wants to go further goes further in the same hour, because there is nobody else in the room to hold to.
Who teaches it?
I do. Abhishek Dabas, a rocket engineer with an MSc in Astronautics and Space Engineering and a BEng in Aerospace Engineering. Every class, personally, never a group and never a stand in. The practice is deliberately small across all four subjects.
How does a family begin?
With a seventy five minute assessment. Forty five minutes with your child, working real problems rather than being interviewed, and thirty with you. Within forty eight hours you receive a written assessment of your child's reasoning: what they understand, what they only appear to understand, and what I would do about it. It is yours to keep whatever you decide afterwards.
11 How every family begins
Begin with an assessment.
Seventy five minutes: forty five with your child working real problems, and thirty with you. Within forty eight hours you receive a written assessment of their reasoning, yours to keep whatever you decide.
A deliberately small practice · taught personally by a rocket engineer