Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – is what determines how fast a student learns to pilot an airplane? Some students seem to race through the syllabus, picking up skills and moving on through the different stages without a backward glance. For others their progress is more measured. With a bit of thought, I’ve put together some common traits I see in the students who make quicker progress.

The ability to be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable

Learning to fly involves succeeding through a parade of experiences that generate feelings of profound worry, uncertainty and fear. First takeoff, first time talking to ATC, first solo landing, first solo cross-country, first night flight, first instrument flight, first entry into inverted flight. Then add in every flight test, every flight review, and every bit of less than ideal weather you fly into, near or through.

Some people lean in to fear and some people are averse to it. Some students misunderstand the nature of training and assume that the path to comfort (and therefore progress) is more training. I think that’s wrong: more training makes you a better student but it doesn’t make you a better pilot. What makes you a better pilot is a clear-eyed and realistic understanding of your own skill level and a willingness to step up to experiences that match it. To make progress you must be ready to stick two fingers up to voices in your head that will always tell you “I can’t do this, I’m not ready for this” when you absolutely can and are.

Something else I’ve noticed recently is a student making a huge stride forward in competence when something happens during a flight that makes them angry. Anger at themselves for something they’ve fouled up, or anger at me (yes it happens) but in all cases a tiny little burst of don’t-give-a-damn-any-more seems to break through the layer of fear of error that paradoxically causes performance deficit.

The ability to keep hold of the right end of the stick

This one, perhaps, may be more of an interpersonal match or mismatch with the instructor  – but since all the flying lessons I observe are taught by me it’s hard to tell which. The point here is that while some students take longer than others to pick up – get the gist – cotton on – to the point of a lesson – the speed at which a lesson is initially learned is not well correlated to how well it is retained.

But some students self-generate a later misunderstanding that can persist for some time. When a generated misunderstanding of something that was previously known correctly comes to light we really need to go back and review, and that can be time-consuming. All instructors are taught to ask questions to confirm understanding. That works well in the short term. My observation is that some students manage, over time, to re-teach themselves in error.

The willingness to engage in the discipline of making a plan and flying that plan

A really good way to get into trouble while piloting a small airplane is to get “behind”. Being ahead of your airplane (and not ‘behind’ it) is a way to express the idea that your control inputs at this second are in support of and designed to achieve a clear and specific goal you have in mind for where your airplane should be and how it should be performing some seconds, minutes or hours into the future. Piloting an airplane isn’t so much a task of controlling it but of shepherding it or ushering it, and you can’t possibly do that well if you don’t know precisely what outcomes you’re shepherding or ushering it toward.

Every successful student learns to plan, eventually: there are a bunch of flight test exercises that explicitly require the candidate, to make a plan for the next few minutes of flight, state that plan to the examiner, and carry out that plan to a successful conclusion. Aside from flight test exercises – every airport departure, every airport arrival, every circuit flown, every long distance cross country trip and every run for the mythical $500 hamburger all involve projecting ahead. And the mental skill of doing so is difficult and takes a lot of effort to get good at.

I have noticed that a subset of students demonstrates a reluctance to knuckle down to the discipline of making plans and putting in real effort to execute those plans in an accurate way. Perhaps it’s a defect of instruction that the student is (at first, anyway) fed a stream of commands to obey – climb, turn, descend, speed up – without the instructor making it clear that those instructions are a product of a plan in the instructor’s mind, and the sooner the student is the one practicing making those plans the better.

Then there’s a factor of fear of failure: if you don’t make a plan, you can’t fail to achieve the plan. Mediocrity is always more comfortable than setting a goal and not reaching it. But comfort is not our goal here.

And then there’s a capacity factor: I’m happy simply maintaning altitude and heading; it’s been frankly a struggle to get the airplane trimmed and set up for level flight. If I turn my attention to the chart I’m holding, to my next checkpoint, to working out my groundspeed – I might upset my equilibrium and drift off altitude. To which I say there’s no merit in being able to fly straight and level perfectly if you’re not ready to verify you’re going in the right direction. Worry that taking paying attention to the planning of the next phase of flight will upset your execution of this phase is clear evidence that you need to practice doing exactly that – again and again, until your capacity expands to match the requirements. Nobody is born able to conduct a low-level diversion exercise while predicting an accurate arrival time and fuel state. It’s a struggle. Students who make faster progress are the ones who push and push and push themselves even though it’s no fun.

Some of the inefficiency of flight training is down to the instructor; I try very hard to minimize this. Some of the inefficiency of flight training is systemic: ATC and traffic delays, bad weather, maintenance issues. There are ways to minimize the effects of these also. And some of the inefficiency of flight training is down to issues only the student has command of, and I’ve tried to describe those here. If you’re a student pilot, or want to be one – I hope this gives you something to think about.