Open Aviation Briefings

A good briefing shapes the concepts the student forms on the ground and directs what the student then pays attention to in the air, giving the instructor a well-trodden yet flexible structure to guide the learning both on the ground and in the air.

But the materials behind those briefings — the slide content, the diagrams, the interactive learning components — those materials take a lot of time and effort to develop and refine with improvements being made over years by individual instructors or a school, each set of materials in an isolated silo of feedback and improvement.

The Open Aviation Briefings project is based on the premise that together we can improve pilot training briefings beyond what we can achieve as individual instructors or schools, using an Open Source licensing model which has helped improve the software running the internet for decades. Individuals and schools can not only use them for free, they can also create and maintain their own themes and modifications to suite their own particular needs.

What’s available now

It’s early days, so each briefing will be released as I prepare each one for my own instructor training (if you want to get involved contact me). The briefings published so far are:

• Briefing 01 — Effects of controls — two theory parts (primary and secondary effects of the controls; ancillary controls, power and the slipstream), a pre-flight brief, and in-flight kneeboard notes.
• Briefing 05 — Slow flight and stalling — two theory parts (stall aerodynamics and recognition; recovery, factors affecting stall speed, HASELL), a pre-flight brief, and in-flight kneeboard notes for the flight activities.
• Briefing 06 — Circuit introduction — two theory parts (the circuit pattern and take-off; in the circuit, approach, and landing), a pre-flight brief, and in-flight kneeboard notes.

I have a backlog of a few more early briefings that I need to convert from the original technology I was using, and more RPL briefings will follow as I work through presenting them myself. If you’d like to be notified or want to help prioritise a particular lesson, get in touch.

What’s in a briefing

Each briefing is built around the same set of pieces, so instructors know what to expect:

• Theory briefs — the ground material, split into one or two parts depending on the lesson, suitable for a classroom screen or projector
• Pre-flight brief — a shorter brief delivered immediately before the flight, covering risk analysis, the in-flight sequence, and any safety checks specific to the exercise
• In-flight notes — a portrait-format kneeboard reference for the airborne sequence, also available as a printable PDF for offline use
• Useful resources for students — links to authoritative external material (CASA, NZ CAA, videos explaining concepts) that pairs well with the briefing
• Example email to students — wording an instructor can adapt and send before the lesson to start engagement early

The slides embed the interactive learning components where they help — for example, an aerofoil flow visualisation inside a stalling brief, or a 3D viewer visualising the four forces acting on an aeroplane. The briefings and components are designed to work together but are independent projects: components can be used in any presentation tool, and the briefings use them as a way to add useful interactive learning without having to add any code.

Easy to use, easy to adapt

The briefings are designed so that an instructor can view, present, and contribute back to them without specialised tools:

• Slides run in any browser. Each briefing is a self-contained web presentation — open the link, or embed it in your own site. There is a notes-and-presenter view for live delivery.
• Slide source is plain text. Slides are written in a Markdown-based format (Marp) that reads naturally as prose. Fixing a typo or adding a sentence is the same as editing a wiki page.
• Interactive components drop in as a single tag. The 3D and chart components from Open Aviation Components appear in slide source as readable tags like <four-forces> — no JavaScript knowledge required to use them.

Free to use and modify — improvements flow back

Briefing content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, which means you can use, adapt, remix, and even commercially redistribute the briefings — provided that any modified version is shared under the same terms. Improvements made by one instructor become available to every other instructor.

The supporting code (build tooling, components) is under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 — the same per-file copyleft used by the interactive components. See the Open Aviation Solutions licensing page for the full picture.

How to contribute

I will add more thorough contribution guidelines in the future, but for now, the briefing sources live on GitHub at Open-Aviation-Solutions/open-aviation-briefings. If you spot an error, have a clearer way to explain something, or want to contribute a whole lesson, get in contact. If you are already familiar with GitHub, I’d love a pull request. If a pull request is more than you want to take on, an issue with the suggestion is just as welcome — or just contact me directly.

If you are a school or training organisation who would like a tailored set of briefings built on the open base — for example, using your actual aircraft in the 3D visualisations, or syllabus variant, please get in touch to discuss.