It's not you, it's me

My first instructor was a much younger female (as in, “I literally have socks older than you”). We got along well, and I learned very quickly, and she often went above and beyond to cram as much as possible into a lesson. We did hood work; we did emergency descents; we flew the LAX mini route.

Except that I had problems landing consistently. I’d land perfectly one time and then bounce or porpoise the next two.

OK, not that unusual. But her attitude was that I’d just eventually “get it” as long as I kept going around the pattern. It wasn’t her money being thrown away, nor her frustration that was growing. She was building time watching me struggle.

The airport we flew from—the well-known Santa Monica Municipal Airport—doesn’t allow touch and goes on weekends when I’d fly, and a full stop means taxiing back and waiting. My longest wait holding short was more than 20 minutes. We’d maybe get in four landings in an hour and a half. I even suggested we fly over the hill to Van Nuys Airport, but she never wanted to.

I went on to several other instructors and switched to flying from Van Nuys, where I could get 10 or 12 landings into the same length lesson. Several just weren’t any better, one of whom literally gave up on me after half-dozen or so lessons, having done nothing out of the box other than covering the instruments so I had to judge altitude and speed by feel.

By this point, I was pretty pissed at instructors in general and wound up going to a “problem solver” who basically did everything from scratch completely different, undoing all of the bad things the other instructors had taught (like improper use of the rudder—holding it through an entire turn instead of just following the yoke). We talked landings to death. We calculated and used V_REF. But he didn’t really go outside of the box, either—until the very end when I just raised hell and said, “You’d better do something or else I’m quitting.” We did low passes, and in talking about things, he realized that I was looking in the right place but at the wrong thing (the surface and not the sides). Landings were suddenly decent that day.

Alas, at that point, I had almost 80 hours and $16,000 without soloing, and I just couldn’t afford to fly anymore.

That was 2010, and I’ve had a couple of “fun” flights since—one with the same instructor about six months later to Santa Barbara for lunch and another a couple of years ago in Colorado Springs, where my landings were pretty awful, even though I was otherwise surprisingly not that rusty.

So a great instructor you get along with and can learn a lot from can still be problematic if he or she doesn’t know how to identify and solve problems that students might have with specific issues.

Jeffrey Sherman
Los Angeles, California