ONE OF THE SECRETS Of flight training is that a lot of people who start training never get to finish it. In one sense it’s a secret, in that you don’t read or hear about it. On the other hand, a bit of thought should persuade you that it’s entirely human and to be expected. After all, lots of people start diets or join gyms, or have a few guitar lessons at some stage in their life. Not all of them will lose the weight they’d like, become a life-long gym goer or end up being able to play the guitar.

I guess before continuing to discuss this we should talk about what it means to “finish” or “not finish” training: most people who book an introductory flying lesson have in mind they want to get a Private Pilot Licence (or higher), so one definition of “not finishing” is to cease regular training before you get a PPL. On the other hand, if your goals change on the way. so that you come to understand that you don’t need or no longer want to go all the way to a PPL, and you’ve decided to stop having lessons – does that mean you’ve not completed your goal? I’ll leave that one floating, for now.

My Flight Training Unit is relatively new – we’ve been going since 2019, and Ivan’s been working with me for just over a year, so it has taken some time to build a representative cohort of students whose training times I can analyze. But last week I had a look through all the (electronic) Pilot Training Records from ab-initio students that are available to see if there are any interesting numbers I can share.

Here’s what I found out.

• I was able to arrange an introductory lesson for 54 new students
• 37 returned for one or more subsequent flying lessons
• 19 have already completed a solo flight or are still training with us and expect to do so.
• 18 students stopped training some time after their second lesson and before they got to make a solo flight.

Of those 18, I estimate the reasons they stopped training were as follows: financial reasons (4), loss of interest in flying (5), scheduling difficulties or moved away from Toronto (2), and reasons unknown (7). The vast majority of these 18 stopped training after 4 or fewer lessons, so people seem to work out fairly quickly whether or not flight training is something they want to continue.

For the students who have made their first solo flight:

• The shortest flight training time before first solo was 13.6 hours
• The the mean number of hours training to solo was 17.5 (median value 17.1)
• and it took on average 13.9 (weekly) lessons.
• The longest time to solo for an ab-initio student who did all their training with us is 25.6 hours.
• All but two students to solo so far have been under 20 hours.

Finally of all the ab-initio students who have made a solo flight, all but two have either passed their PPL flight test or are still training weekly. And those two are on hiatus, but assure me they are keen to finish when they feel the time is right.

How are we doing compared to other training units? I don’t know of any other flight school that publishes (or even records) these statistics so I can’t make any comparison. Anecdotally, I know from teaching at other flight schools in the past that the majority of students entering training do actually give up part way through: I have been asked to help dispose of boxes and boxes of abandoned student records – so I feel that we here are keeping more than most.

I also think that our average time-to-solo is very good, considering that we’re teaching out of one of the busiest airports in Canada in the busiest airspace. It remains a priority of mine to be respectful of my customers’ wallets and time, so I’m always looking for more effective and efficient ways to teach the basic skills that pilots need.

In terms of flight test times and results, while we have had some very good test scores, and had some students that started elsewhere complete their training here, we haven’t yet had a statistically significant number of students who began their training with us reach the end of that training. So I don’t have enough numbers to draw any conclusions from yet. I hope that this is something I can revisit in, say, a year’s time.