Is It Hard to Learn How to Fly?
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?