Sounds to me like the problem is more with the trainers, not the
trainees...

Greg Esres wrote in
news
Had the student been trained specifically about porpoising?

Not likely. Who is, unless it's encountered accidentally during
pre-solo training?

My feeling is that porpoising is unlikely with a student who is
trained to give a near-stall landing.


Do you mean to say that students perform their landings "to-spec" every
time at 10 hours? I had some very specific discussions about adding power
during a bounce to avoid porpoising down the runway. Maybe I was lucky to
have an instructor who knew what to talk about, although I was his first
full-time student.

IIRC, the topic was listed on a sort-of checklist of things that we
covered in training. We didn't follow it to the letter, but it did serve
as a syllabus to help monitor progress as we went, and to review
periodically to make sure we were on track and didn't miss anything.

Perhaps you should have your club write up something similar...

A student who isn't ready to risk a $170,000 plane isn't ready to
risk her or his life.

In that past 6 years that I've been flying at this club, we've lost 5
airplanes due to landing accidents, 3 of which were solo students.
Another 172R was badly damaged during a solo student touch and go,
which ended touch and go's for students.

No one was ever hurt duing these accidents, so clearly there are many
more bent airplanes than bent pilots.


Sounds to me like you have been lucky till now. Does your club want to
count on luck to prevent more serious consequences?