Pilot Training Resources

I have approximately 1,500 hours of flight instruction given in my career as a flight instructor. In all those hours, I really only saw one person who I felt was wasting their money on flight lessons because of a basic inability to learn what was necessary to become a safe pilot.

Therefore, the conclusion that could be drawn from that statement is that it is not difficult to learn how to fly. While you could argue that it is an accurate statement, it is not the whole truth. What makes learning how to fly such a difficult proposition is the amount of commitment that is required from the student. It’s a commitment of time, money, effort and book learning for a reasonably long period of time.

Many student pilots fail to achieve their goal of becoming a private pilot or sport pilot because they do not fully understand what is going to be expected of them during the training process. I recently had the opportunity to speak with a former student pilot who stated that one of the reasons he stopped taking lessons was because he was “forced” to scrape the ice off of the non-hangered Cessna 152 trainer on his early morning, early winter training days. He seemed to be under the impression that for what he was paying to rent the plane, the instructor or the school should be out there scraping the ice crystals off it. I smiled as I remembered back almost 30 years to when I had to do the same thing, but I remember a smile on my face while I was doing it, because I knew that as soon as I was done preflighting the airplane I was going to get to fly that sucker! The bottom liine is that removing the rime ice off the wings, windshield, etc. of your plane is part of the flying experience, part of a proper preflight and overall just something that you are expected to do. Maybe the instructor never explained that to this student or maybe there were other things that bothered him also, but the bottom line is that the expectations and responsibilities of a student pilot were probably not fully explained to this person.

Even though the payment of my bills depended on me finding students to take flying lessons from me, I always made sure that I painted the worst possible picture for them about what learning how to fly is all about, because I wanted a quality student, not a bunch of students that were only going to quit when they hit a rough spot in the road.

Therefore, make sure whoever you go to in order to learn how to fly that you find out what questions you need to be asking to make sure you have the full picture of what is expected of you. Here are some questions I would be asking:

How many people have you had pass the FAA check ride? What is the pass percentage? What will be your expectations of me as a student pilot? Will I learn how to fly an airplane with a glass panel cockpit? Are you just building time as a flight instructor? Will you be around to finish my training? If you do end up leaving, what will happen to my training? What is a realistic cost to become a private pilot or obtain a sport pilot’s license?

First of all, it is very, very rare that one becomes a jet pilot without first learning how to fly basic airplanes. I suppose someone could purchase their own jet airplane and find a flight instructor to teach them how to become a jet pilot without ever having flown anything before, but it would be very, very rare. Plus, just because you are a jet pilot doesn’t mean that there’s any insurance companies that would be willing to insure you or your airplane.

Usually, becoming a jet pilot is a step-by-step process. However, with companies like Eclipse Aviation turning out easy to fly jet airplanes like their Eclipse 500 very light jet, anything is possible. Yet, let’s pretend that none of us are eccentric, rich, lottery winners and we need to go at this jet pilot thing one baby step at a time.

The first license you need to obtain is a Private Pilot’s license. The private pilot’s license takes no less than 40 hours of flight time to achieve. If you go to a specially approved Part 141 flight school that follows a much more rigerous and standardized curriculum, you could earn the license in as little as 35 hours. These hours are the minimum required and most people take around 60-70 hours on the average.

In order to keep moving towards your goal of being a jet pilot, you could actually give the insurance companies a call and see what they have to say about covering you now that you have a private pilot’s license. Most likely, the premium is going to be high, and they are going to have some conditions. First, you are going to need a multi-engine rating. Getting a multi-engine rating is not really that big of a deal and can usually be done in a matter of days. After the multi-engine rating, they are going to want you to attend a school to teach you all about the aircraft you want to buy. Assuming you’ve never been at the controls of a jet aircraft before, the simulator (probably full motion) at the flight safety schoool you attend will most likely be your first attempt at “flying” a jet airplane. Let’s just for the sake of talking say that you want to buy a Cessna Citation jet, which is one of the few jet airplanes that is certified for single pilot operation. This is one of the most popular jets for up and coming jet pilots. The insurance companies have a lot of experience insuring these type of jets, and therefore, they know what they want to see to be comfortable insuring a new jet pilot. Usually, what they will want is 100 hours of turbine time, with the vast majority of it given by a flight instructor.

Most people will not jump right into a jet airplane as a private pilot with low time. The normal progression would be into a complex, single engine airplane, then into a multi-engine aircraft or possibly a turbine powered single. Then, you’ll want to build up your multi-engine time and your turbine time. Once you have enough multi-engine and turbine time, the insurance companies won’t have to think as hard about insuring you.

Of course, the short cut way to becoming a jet pilot is to head off to Moscow, pay around $9,000, and they’ll put you into one of their Mig fighters to tear up the sky at Mach 2 with your hair on fire!

The short answer to what does it really take to become a private pilot is time and money. The longer answer is a bit more complicated. Let me dispel the myth that pilots are super human beings. I think my wife would readily confirm that I lack even an average level of coordination. She grits her teeth when I drive, but she’s at ease with me in the air (or at least I think she is). I’ve always felt that I fly an airplane better than I drive a car, and the main reason is training. If they made it as difficult to get a driver’s license as they do a private pilot certificate, the number of accidents would decrease dramatically.

Learning how to fly is a skill like anything else. It just happens to incorporate a whole new dimension, namely the vertical one, that makes the sport of flying just a little more difficult than driving or boating. Flying, like most anything else, can be taught to just about anyone with the desire to learn.

The two big obstacles of time and money can usually be overcome if you are motivated enough. The new sport pilot’s license makes earning your wings even easier. Sport pilot applicants learning in light sport aircraft are earning their license in about half the time and cost as private pilot applicants flying certified aircraft. Going the sport pilot route can make a lot of sense in the goal of becoming a private pilot.

Right now, the FAA requires 40 hours of flight training to obtain a private pilot’s license. That is a minimum number that can further be reduced to just 35 hours if you learn at a Part 141 approved school. Having said that, in my 1500 hours of flight instruction given, I can’t recall either goal being met by any student. I would tell my persepective students to plan on at least 75 hours of total time to get licensed, and I was one of the greatest flight instructors out there (modest too!). With an hour of dual instruction averaging $125 per hour, you can see where the money trouble comes in, especially if you were initally planning on just 40 hours of training.

The training itself is, well, a heck of alot of fun! I am a little biased, but I always tried to make every lesson, no matter what we were learning, fun. I just assume that no one is getting licensed so that they can get up in the air and torture themselves. Flying is fun. Going places in an airplane under your control is fun. Learning stalls and doing landing after landing is, well, okay, maybe not fun fun, but it’s kind of fun, really, it is.

In conclusion, get your finances set up to finish the training as quickly as possible, and you’ll find that you spent less money than the person that was unable to fly at least once a week. Also, get the ground school out of the way first thing.