Hours of flight time are a curious commodity. “How many hours do you have?” is one of the first things you are likely to ask a pilot you just met (especially if that pilot is seeking to rent an aircraft from the company that employs you as a flight instructor).
Hours tell a story, but they rarely tell the whole story. Hours are deeply embedded in regulations governing eligibility for certificates and ratings. Meeting the requirements for cross-country flying, solo flying, test prep, and total time is prerequisite to being allowed to take a practical test. Some pilots find that they must churn up the air for a few dozen hours before beginning advanced training because of minimum-hours requirements.
But hours can be a misleading or even irrelevant statistic. Who has more “taildragger experience,” for instance: a pilot who devoted 10 hours to intensive practice of crosswind takeoffs and landings last week in a newly purchased airplane? Or the pilot who bought the same type airplane on the same day, and flew twice as much that week, but logged just one takeoff and one landing on each of 10 two-hour flights?
Preoccupation with hours can bring a student a scolding from an instructor or some other flight sage who reminds you that hours aren’t everything. Among aviation’s many adages is the one which asserts that there is a big difference between a pilot who has flown 1,500 hours and another who has flown one hour 1,500 times.
It’s not uncommon for flight instructors to have to reassure their students about progress they are making in training once the students discover that they have flown twice as many hours as someone else in the training program, but have not progressed as far toward certain benchmarks like solo. In that case, hours are a negative influence.
Even when a pilot’s total hours impress, the nature and recency of those hours still warrant scrutiny—especially how many of those were flown in the make and model a pilot seeks to rent, purchase, or fly for employment.
(Ask any flight instructor who has been assured by a prospective renter—whose logbook runs to three or more volumes and whose make-and-model experience tends toward the overwhelming—how much assurance it is safe to take from that record on a windy day in the pattern in a Cessna 150.)
Both the quantity and the quality of those hours will weigh on the finding of cause when something goes wrong, as something very fundamental did when a 440-hour flight instructor took a passenger for an introductory flight from Stow, Massachusetts, on August 19, 2014, in a Diamond DA20 single-engine airplane.
While landing on the 2,770-foot runway, “the airplane began to bounce,” said the National Transportation Safety Board’s online accident summary. “After the third touchdown, the nose gear collapsed, which resulted in substantial damage to the underside of the fuselage. The airplane’s second touchdown was described as ‘rough’ by the pilot, and ‘much more forceful than the initial touchdown’ by the passenger.”
An unfortunate introduction to flight—but at least, injury-free.
The NTSB report noted some pilot indecision about how to handle the hard landing, stating that “he considered aborting the landing after the first bounce, but elected to continue the landing attempt.”
Quantifying pilot experience and its recency, the NTSB noted that the 440 hours of total flight time “included about eight hours in the same make and model as the accident airplane, of which 1.2 hours were accumulated during the previous 90 days.”
The report stated this probable accident cause: “The flight instructor/pilot’s failure to recover from a bounced landing, which resulted in a hard landing and the subsequent collapse of the nose landing gear. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor’s lack of total experience in the make and model of the accident airplane.”
Hours in a logbook sometimes serve as a benchmark, and sometimes prove that a mandate has been fulfilled. But don’t confuse history with proficiency—and beware introducing someone to an airplane with which you may still be a relative stranger yourself.
Dan Namowitz is an aviation writer and flight instructor. He has been a pilot since 1985 and an instructor since 1990.
Related Articles
