Narrative:

This incident occurred on the second of two training flights today. I was instructing a new hire pilot. He was a bit 'behind' the aircraft as we were being vectored to the final approach course for an ILS approach. We were given an intercept heading and told to maintain 1700 feet until established cleared for the ILS approach. The student became disoriented with autopilot procedures and I allowed myself to get too involved with helping him sort that out and lost my situational awareness. I allowed the aircraft to inadvertently descended 500 feet below the assigned published altitude. At 1200 feet I saw altimeter; immediately disengaged the autopilot and aggressively began a steep climb to 1700 feet at full power. Just as the aircraft began its climb; ATC provided a low altitude alert and told me to climb back to 1700 feet which I did. I believe I apologized to the ATC controller. After giving the aircraft back to the student after a low approach; he again became overwhelmed and busted another climb altitude assignment by 250 feet. At that point I terminated the training flight; took over the duties as sole manipulator of the controls and flew the aircraft back to home base uneventfully; allowing the student to only work the GPS and set up the approach into our home airport. I had a long week of ground school instruction followed by office duties which had me working an average 12 hours a day 6 days in a row. The first flight in an actual aircraft with the student in the morning should have been our only flight today. I tried to conduct a second flight due to operational tempo. I allowed the student to get too far 'behind the aircraft' before intervening. I lost my situational awareness due to poor instructional techniques. I will not let ops tempo drive my rate of training ever again. Fatigue caused my sloppiness as well as the students'. I will not let a student get that far behind the aircraft again. Early intervention results in higher learning curve.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: A flight instructor distracted by a student struggling with the autopilot reported he allowed the student to descend below the assigned altitude.

Narrative: This incident occurred on the second of two training flights today. I was instructing a new hire pilot. He was a bit 'behind' the aircraft as we were being vectored to the final approach course for an ILS approach. We were given an intercept heading and told to maintain 1700 feet until established cleared for the ILS approach. The student became disoriented with autopilot procedures and I allowed myself to get too involved with helping him sort that out and lost my situational awareness. I allowed the aircraft to inadvertently descended 500 feet below the assigned published altitude. At 1200 feet I saw altimeter; immediately disengaged the autopilot and aggressively began a steep climb to 1700 feet at full power. Just as the aircraft began its climb; ATC provided a low altitude alert and told me to climb back to 1700 feet which I did. I believe I apologized to the ATC controller. After giving the aircraft back to the student after a low approach; he again became overwhelmed and busted another climb altitude assignment by 250 feet. At that point I terminated the training flight; took over the duties as sole manipulator of the controls and flew the aircraft back to home base uneventfully; allowing the student to only work the GPS and set up the approach into our home airport. I had a long week of ground school instruction followed by office duties which had me working an average 12 hours a day 6 days in a row. The first flight in an actual aircraft with the student in the morning should have been our only flight today. I tried to conduct a second flight due to operational tempo. I allowed the student to get too far 'behind the aircraft' before intervening. I lost my situational awareness due to poor instructional techniques. I will not let ops tempo drive my rate of training ever again. Fatigue caused my sloppiness as well as the students'. I will not let a student get that far behind the aircraft again. Early intervention results in higher learning curve.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.