On Feb 10, 8:34*pm, DGS wrote:

What a great post...this one really made me feel better. *What you
describe here is a carbon copy of how I feel, especially the part
about questioning yourself and feeling like a failure

I'm glad I could help. You are not a failure because you had those
feelings. They are completely normal. Flying an airplane involves a
whole raft of new sensations and a big set of new skills. On that
first flight, the sensations are totally unfamiliar and the skills are
totally unlearned. With each successive flight you will chip away at
both until you become comfortable flying, and one day you will go from
"how am I ever going to be able to do this?" to "hey, I think I can do
this!".

The failure in this situation was the failure of the instructor to
prepare you for how overwhelming that first flight can be. From
reading other posts like yours here, I suspect that there are very few
instructors who talk about this. There are probably a number of
reasons they don't. They probably don't remember much about how they
felt on their first flight. Pilots tend toward macho, and talking
about feelings is not really a macho thing to do. And they want you
as a customer, so they don't want to paint flying lessons in a
negative light.

But you've got this group, and you've gotten a lot of good feedback.
I hope you keep at it. It's good to push yourself out of your comfort
zone once in a while. Flying will definitely challenge you, but it
doesn't require any superhuman abilities. Every day normal human
beings just like you get into airplanes and fly them. If they can do
it, so can you.

Phil