Dear Rod:
I am a 30.6-hour student (no solo yet), having spent the past 15 hours in the traffic pattern with my instructor practicing full-stop landings. At best I can do four or five landings (if I’m lucky) in the allotted lesson time. Is this normal? I’m concerned about all the money I’m spending.—Please, No Name
Greetings PNN:
No, it’s not normal in the traditional sense. I am a very big fan of touch-and-go landings for several reasons, the most important of which is that they provide more landing practice. Practice landings made to a full stop is a relatively newer trend whose genesis is the notion that touch and goes are dangerous. Well, they are risky if there’s a weak instructor on board with poor stick and rudder skills. In almost every single instance that I recall where a CFI and student bent an airplane during a touch and go, the accident revealed a deficiency in airmanship on the part of the instructor. There’s absolutely no reason that a competent flight instructor can’t perform touch and goes safely with a student—none whatsoever.
What if the runway is too short to do touch and goes? Fine. Fly to an airport with a longer runway. What if noise abatement procedures don’t permit touch and goes? Fine. Fly to an airport that permits touch and goes. To do four, maybe five landings during one lesson on landings is entirely unreasonable. After all, if that lesson cost you $200 total, then you paid $50 per landing. Yikes!
Dear Rod:
I’m considering working as a flight instructor for a local school. I’m a new instructor (took and passed the checkride last November), but I face a dilemma. This flight school requires that all their primary students achieve practical test standards before solo. My CFI-prep instructor suggests that this doesn’t comport with his flight training experience or any that he’s heard of. Is this a common industry practice?—J.N.
Greetings J.N.:
This is a recent and unusual trend in aviation, so allow me point out what I believe to be the reason behind this movement.
Over the past decade, the pedagogical drift in the flight training community has led some to use the FAA’s practical test standards (PTS) as practical training standards. They are absolutely not the same. The PTS is a guide to be used in preparing someone to demonstrate the behavior the FAA expects to see on a private pilot checkride. It is not, nor should it be, the standard of training you require of your primary students.
When you begin training a primary student, your personal training standards should be defined by the goals you want to accomplish. The very first goal of flight training isn’t to prepare a student to behave as if he or she is being examined for a pilot certificate. It’s to prepare your student for solo flight under a very specific set of conditions (something that has been done safely by instructors for decades). This is why the FAA lists two separate sets of knowledge/experience requirements in the FARs. One set is for solo flight; the other for private pilot eligibility—with the latter being far more comprehensive and demanding. Said another way, the FAA neither expects nor requires your student to have private pilot proficiency and capability in order to solo an airplane.
Soloing students when they’re ready to do so safely, instead of first training them to demonstrate “checkride-like” behaviors, offers many benefits. It means that students typically solo earlier and develop self-confidence earlier, too. Solo also communicates that you, the instructor, trust your students to successfully apply the skills and knowledge you’ve provided. Ultimately, you help your students forge their aviation decision-making ability earlier by soloing them in the pattern when they have the skills to do so safely. That’s the big payoff for the traditional solo flight.
Soloing students based on their meeting the behaviors stipulated in the practical test standards isn’t common industry practice. Instead, most instructors use a more practical training standard for solo flight. This training standard is based on FAR 61.87 (solo requirements for student pilots) rather than FAA-S-8081-14B (Private Pilot Practical Test Standards).
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