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New Aviator DISCOVERING THE JOY OF FLIGHT
Flight Training: Sticking It Out
While training may seem to fly by up until the first solo, those weeks that sometimes stretch into months between your cross-country flights and your check ride can be difficult to bear. Scheduling conflicts, weather, and the need to ensure your skills are sufficiently up to snuff can combine to make the latter part of your training seem like an endurance race.
So much in aviation training seems geared toward career pilots that those learning to fly as a hobby later in life often feel at odds with a training schedule that never seems to end. How do you stay committed when your job and family are running short of patience?
“A lot of my time is taken up by family and all kinds of other distractions in my life,” said 185-hour student pilot Ario Bigattini, of Petaluma, California. “It wasn’t the money--that wasn't an issue—it was the time. Every time I was flying, I was learning; it’s just that I wasn’t progressing. I was completely dependent on my instructor only because I wasn’t remembering anything.”
Like many students who are not airline bound, Ario, 38, has to balance his job as a manager for an engineering company with his family commitments and still find time to fly. Flying on the weekends was never an option, so he's found ways to schedule his once-weekly flight lessons into a week-day schedule.
“I was looking at these young kids in the summer, and they would show up every day and they were done in three months,” says Ario, who has been training for two years.
“In retrospect I realize it would have been easier to take some compromises on some of my other activities.”
At the time of this writing (mid December), Ario was almost ready for his practical exam test. Finding time to become a pilot is not easy. In the beginning, each lesson brought new skills and a new sense of mastery.
The day you learned how to do a steep turn correctly, the time you recover from a stall without your instructor’s help, the day you finally greased a landing. They’re milestones that motivate students from lesson to lesson.
But once you’ve soloed and completed your cross-country, you’re in a sort of neverland where moving to the next step is dependent on your instructor approving you to take the practical test. And while you may feel you're ready, your instructor will be in no big hurry to rush you through to the test, no matter how much you complain.
In certain parts of the country, weather can result in training delays. That, coupled with your busy schedule, may leave gaps that your instructor will want filled before he or she signs you off.
It’s difficult to explain to a spouse why you have to continue practicing landings after your told him or her how masterfully you had learned to land the airplane just a
few short months ago. More than one spouse has been heard to complain, “You have to practice steep turns again? I thought you already did that!”
As time goes on, the commitment of time and sometimes money becomes an issue that creates tension. For those who work for a living, scheduling time away from work-and away from the family, also becomes a challenge.
Jeff Carns, a 28-year-old television producer and 45-hour student pilot from Cherry Hill, NJ, has soloed and is looking forward to his cross-country training. The only thing holding him back is that his second instructor is leaving and he needs to find another instructor.
“At this point I think I’ve mastered the fundamentals, it's just a matter of getting the requirements done,” Jeff says. “It’s a challenge which is why I like it and it's something that I’ve decided, come hell or high water I’m going to master.”
For students who can only fly on the weekends, a successive string of two or three rainy weekends can set your training back months, requiring more and more instruction time to keep you sharp for your exam. It is often this last stretch of training, which seems designed simply to keep you from your goal, that is the most frustrating.
“It’s the job of the flight instructor to keep everybody motivated,” says Daryl Hudson, a 25-year CFI who runs Ukiah Aviation in Ukiah, California. Sometimes, you have to “get inside their heads and figure out why they’re doing this and use that to keep them motivated.”
Hudson says that many of his older students have wanted to fly for years, so he uses that desire to accomplish their goal as motivation to keep going. Others may have purchased an airplane, and that purchase can be motivation enough to keep the student plugging through repetitive training.
Most instructors we spoke with feel this phase of training is perhaps the most important because it focuses on refining skills that will help you be a safe pilot. While most of those skills have to do with pilot technique, many have more to do with judgement, maturity and patience, qualities that are regularly required of every pilot.
“We are certainly not trying to ask people to redemonstrate over and over again what they have mastered,” said Richard Orentzel, director of flight training at Panorama in White Plains, New York. “We want to make sure the pilot to be is exercising good judgement, It’s possible that the student is doing OK, but still needs some prompting. The quieter the flight instructor gets [during training], the better. But if we have to keep correcting something or making suggestions, then they're not ready.”
As a student pilot at the age of 35, I was frustrated by the delays between the completion of my cross-country flights and my practical test. I had done well on the written and wanted to “get it over with” so I could be done with training and fly on my own.
On the first day my flight test was scheduled, the examiner was unable to drive from his base in New Jersey to the airport I was at in Farmingdale, NY. One of the instructors offered to sign me off to fly to New Jersey solo to take the test, but he pointed out a problem: If I failed my practical test or were unable to complete it for some reason, both I and the airplane would be stuck in New Jersey, and the examiner would not able to sign me off for the flight home.
The instructor pointed out that flying to New Jersey—while I could do it—left me with no alternatives in case things didn't go the way I expected. And that, he pointed out, would tell the examiner a lot about my judgement.
I decided not to go.
A few weeks later the examiner arrived at Long Island and during a review of my log
book, noted an entry that required a signature. Since the log book needed to be complete before my oral could begin, we waited nearly two hours until my instructor arrived to sign the log book.
Another hour later, and less than 30 minutes before dark, I had completed my oral. The examiner asked me if I wanted to go up for the flight test, and after a tough couple of minutes, I said no. There didn't appear to be enough time before dark to complete the flight test. “Good decision,” he said smiling, and we scheduled the flight test for yet another day.
Dale Roberts, a 46-year-old student pilot with 75 hours in his log book, is ready to take his practical test, he just needs to find time to take his written test. “Finding time to study is the tough thing,” he says.
Roberts originally decided to take flying lessons in May 2005 and figured he'd have it wrapped up by December of that year. Then he discovered that as a non-citizen of the United States he needed to get approval by the Transportation Security Administration, and once that was completed, he needed to find an instructor who was approved to teach him.
Fortunately, he's not getting stressed out about the delays. “I'm quite happy to keep clocking the hours up with the instructor,” he says. “I think it's all time well-spent in the aircraft.”
“When you learn to drive, you've been a passenger in a car for a long time, so you therefore have a lot of experience in cars ... just by observing,” Richard says. “When you're in an airplane, usually people don't have a lot of experience, so it's a good idea, even at the end, if you have an opportunity to observe flights.”
Richard says most students do eventually complete their training, particularly older students-late 20's and up-because it's something they have wanted to do for a long time and they are at the point in their lives when they can financially afford to do it. “It's not a cake walk, and it's not cheap either-it's a commitment. But the payoff at the end is absolutely wonderful,” he says.
For students struggling to keep training focused and complete it as quickly as possible, there are some things you can do to streamline the process.
First and perhaps foremost, stick with one instructor. While some instructors will sometimes ask another instructor to fly with you to get a different perspective on your skills, changing instructors during training will increase the amount of time it takes to get your license because the new instructor will need to be satisfied that you have learned the skills the previous instructor taught.
Second, plan to fly more than once a week. If you can arrange to fly two or three times a week, your retention will be better, and you will learn faster. This is one area where the spouse may resist your efforts, but it is a proven fact that the more frequently you train, the quicker you will learn.
Bite the bullet and get it done.
Third, once you’ve completed your solo requirements, don't continue to solo; pair up
with your instructor and focus on fine-tuning your technique and building confidence for the practical test. “Any bad habits you have will get worse if you go out and continue to practice on your own, it’s not necessary,” Richard says.
Fourth, listen to your instructor. Often, the last few weeks or months of training can seem like endless repetition that is designed simply to frustrate your efforts to complete the process. “Older students are used to success,” says Richard. More than one student has asked, “Would you sign me off already?
And the answer is no; Would you please do it the way we’re asking you to do it already?”
“Not everyone passes the checkride. If everyone passed, then I would say we are over-training them, but that doesn’t happen,” Richard says.
Remember that being approved to take the practical test by your instructor doesn’t just mean you’ve put in time and met the requirements outlined by the FAA. It means that your instructor believes that you can act as pilot in command of an airplane—without someone else telling you the weather is too bad to go or the airplane isn’t in a condition to fly. Your instructor is essentially approving you to be a pilot, and it’s the examiner’s job to determine whether he or she agrees with the instructor’s assessment.
That's a big responsibility, one that most instructors won’t take lightly. So as frustrating as those last few weeks or months of training can be, stick with it. You'll get through them.
—Sean Fulton
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