On May 4, 8:24*pm, Ricky wrote:
Here's possibly a stretch of a question...

My daughter is only 7 but already I'm thinking of her driving and,
hopefully, learning to fly (like me). I'd love to teach her myself if
she shows interest.

I've heard many times that a pilot makes a safer driver and, looking
at myself & some other pilots I know, I believe that may be true. I've
never seen statistics but would be interested in knowing if this is
fact statistically.

Anyway, I expect to be a CFII & further soon (com./inst. now) and was
wondering if anyone has ever taught a sibling (or anyone for that
matter) to fly before they learned to drive?
Do you think it would make for a safer driver?

Ricky

From my own experience as a youngster and later on as a CFI my opinion
would be that you are safe and indeed well advised to treat the two
issues separately. In my case, I was exposed from about age 8 to a
serious flying environment where I was around flying and people who
fly almost constantly.
This culminated in an age 16 solo.
I wasn't exposed to driving until age 15.

As an instructor, I would advise that age 7 is just fine to start a
youngster with an aviation exposure and education. Plenty of time
later on for the driving. The reasoning for this is that almost all
required to produce a safe driver has to be done while driving (expect
learning the driver's manual of course), but flying requires a much
deeper and more comprehensive learning curve where much of what has to
be retained is learned outside the cockpit.

So feel free in my opinion anyway, to start the exposure to aviation
as early as your child's interest dictates it can be done. It's never
too early to begin answering questions, and with a few well placed
cushions and some monitoring from you, actual flying of the airplane
can inspire a child as nothing else in the world could achieve.

As for me, I loved every second of my early exposure to aviation. In
the end analysis, I'd probably say that my learning to drive simply
made my trip to the airport a bit faster :-)

Hope this helped a bit, and the best of luck to you and your daughter.
Dudley Henriques