With a busy high school social life, Editor in Chief Thomas B. Haines took two full years to learn to fly.
News flash: It takes longer to learn to fly than it used to. Stunning revelation, I know. Anyone who knows anyone who is learning to fly can tell you the trials and tribulations of being a student pilot. The age-old weather and maintenance issues remain for today's generation of students, but added in are more complex regulations, an ever-more-tired fleet of training aircraft, an ever-younger crop of flight instructors hoping to move as quickly as possible into an airline cockpit, and seemingly an ever-decreasing amount of free time to pursue personal challenges.
Despite the hurdles, the general aviation industry has been successful in attracting new prospects to flying. The industry-sponsored Be A Pilot (BAP) program piqued the interest of more than 32,000 candidates last year. The program's television advertising campaign espouses the benefits and joys of flying a general aviation airplane. Prospects are encouraged to call a toll-free telephone number for information about flying and to locate a participating flight school near them. Or they can go to the BAP Web site ( www.beapilot.com) for the same information and to print out a $49 introductory flight coupon. Of those 32,000 who responded last year, nearly 6,000 became new student pilots, according to a recent survey conducted by BAP.
About 28 percent of the prospects who responded from June through October had already taken their introductory flights when contacted for the November survey. Almost all of those who had not yet taken the ride intended to do so in the near future — the majority within 90 days. Of those who had taken the introductory flight, two-thirds had started flight training and about a third had logged more than 20 hours. Surprisingly, about half of the prospects said they had never before been in a single-engine airplane. That statistic seems to imply that there are a lot of people with no connection to general aviation who, when presented with the right message, will head for the airport.
What happens next depends a great deal on the reception they receive at the flight school and FBO. Unfortunately, too often there is no reception at all. The prospect is met with indifference. Equally bad: counter help who either likes to share the gory death-and-destruction tales of flights gone bad or, to the contrary, refuses to acknowledge the risks associated with flying, leaving the prospects to guess the truth.
According to an informal survey conducted by AOPA recently, those who muddle on need ever-greater fortitude in order to complete their training. The survey of AOPA members who telephoned with a question or who visited our Web site shows that the amount of time — in flight hours and in months of instruction — continues to grow. Because of the nature of the survey, the results may not be completely projectable to the entire pilot population, but even adjusted for some inherent bias, the trend is clear. Flight training takes longer to complete now than it did in decades past. This, despite the fact that there has been only minimal change to the private-pilot curriculum in the past 30 years — especially in regard to items that should add significantly to flight time. There have been tweaks to types and amounts of night flying, and a greater emphasis on the ability to recover from unusual attitudes by reference to instruments, but neither should add much to total time.
Some of the survey responders learned to fly as long ago as 1930 and some completed their flight training just last year.
Those who learned to fly prior to 1960 needed about 49.8 flight hours to earn the blessing of the federal government. On the other hand, those who learned to fly after 1990 required 68.2 hours on average to get the FAA's nod. The number went up further for those who trained after 1997 — to 70.5 hours. Finally, those trained after 2000 required 80.7 hours to perfect the material.
Are today's students somehow less, um, bright than those of yesteryear? I don't think so. Instead, there's simply a lot more to learn — covered by the regulations or not. In addition, there are a lot more demands on people's time than there used to be, dragging out the process over a longer time, requiring greater review periods in order to master the curriculum. Pilots learning to fly prior to 1960 took just 11.7 months on average to weave through the process. Those learning to fly after 2000 needed 13.1 months.
Think about it: How much airspace and radio communication knowledge did the pilot learning to fly prior to 1960 need? Any of those pilots still flying in today's environment have had to come up to speed on the various complex airspace classes and the use of radios, but they've done so after they completed their training. Terminal control areas, the predecessor to today's Class B airspace, didn't even exist until the 1970s. VOR navigation was in its infancy in the 1950s and most GA airplanes did not have VOR receivers. Students had to learn dead reckoning, pilotage, and maybe a little about ADF navigation and radio ranges.
Except for the radio ranges, today's students have to learn all of those, plus VOR navigation and now GPS. The regs then and now basically say that the student must know how to navigate using the equipment in the airplane. The difference is there's more equipment in the airplanes today.
In addition, flight instructors are more conservative now than they used to be. Whereas students routinely soloed in well under 10 hours years ago, today many take twice that or longer. Twenty-first-century students master the basics just as quickly as their predecessors, but CFIs see no good reason to turn them loose early in the curriculum. Instead, they prefer to help students polish many skills, especially crosswind landings and basic navigation, before allowing solo flight. We see the results in an ever-improving safety record. The safety record for flight instruction has always been better than for most other areas of general aviation, and it continues to be today even as the overall safety record has improved dramatically in the past 40 years.
When someone with a public forum learns to fly, it can be either really bad or really good for general aviation. I've watched with interest as Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes magazine, has learned to fly. Here's a bright, middle-aged guy who can spend his leisure time — limited as I'm sure it is — in any number of ways: skiing, golfing, sailing, whatever. And he's chosen flying. In an early 2000 edition of his magazine he discusses how U.S. industries have learned the hard lessons of how to compete against foreign companies by improving their quality and more importantly by making products that save consumers time. In the editorial, he acknowledges that he's learning to fly and notes how ambivalent the industry is toward newcomers. He admonishes that with few exceptions, "vendors and service providers are colossal wasters of your time." Business is in the doldrums, "but try to get a dealer to return your call, an instructor to show up on time for your lesson, or a hangar operator to lift a finger to help you. This industry has come within an inch of dying yet remains oblivious to the revolutions in quality and time."
Isn't it amazing what those outside looking in can observe?
Karlgaard updates the world on his general aviation experience in a November/December 2001 article in The American Spectator. When the stock market is booming in early 2000, he buys a late-model Beechcraft Bonanza to finish his flight training. He quickly learns that the high-performance airplane might not be the perfect teacher. About the time the markets crash and the Bonanza needs some eye-watering, wallet-emptying repairs, he sells it and stops flying. A few months later, missing what he calls his "aerial Prozac," Karlgaard returns to general aviation, completes his pilot certificate, and buys a quarter share in a new Cessna 172.
During his training, he is astounded at all that must be learned and complains loudly of the necessity to learn VOR navigation in an airplane equipped with GPS. "Global positioning has knocked VOR back to the Stone Age," he clamors. And yet students have to "knuckle down and master VOR, including (I kid you not) Morse code and spastic needles. It's the same old depressing story: regulations, etched into law when they made sense, then hanging around long after their useful life."
But despite the hassle, Karlgaard is hooked like the rest of us. "Flying is a huge kick and a privilege, too." He tells his national audience of plans to visit every state in a small airplane. "Level at 2,500 on a clear day you can watch pass under your cowling the most God-blessed landscape that ever was or will be."
Amen! Welcome aboard, brother Rich. You've got it bad.
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