Jay, exactly what part of your training would you have liked to have
been reduced or eliminated?

Once I demonstrated I could fly straight and level under the hood,
nearly all of my IFR stuff was related to dealing with emergencies. I
still hire CFIIs to polish those skills, don't you?

Now, if you said getting legal in a car should be made harder, I'd
agree with that! For what it's worth, I think a car should be disabled
until the person in the driver's seat can pass some sort of a reaction
time test -- screw trying to blow a low number -- so that would keep
many of us too tired, or too old, off the roads.






On Dec 31, 12:14 pm, "Jay Honeck" wrote:
Training is obstacle enough already. And if flying isn't complex, why
is the training so complex and difficult?Ah, NOW we get to the meat of the issue. This is a problem that EAA
and AOPA have grappled with for decades.

There is simply NO reason for GA flight training to be so complex --
period. Unless you intend to move onto the airlines, or fly charters,
you simply do not need to learn much of what is in the current flight
training syllabus.

Unfortunately, the FAA bureaucracy is inflexible and unbending. Every
time EAA or AOPA proposes a simplified pilot certificate, in an effort
to expand flying to regular folk, we end up with abortions like "Sport
Pilot", which simplified things only slightly, but resulted in
relatively severe limitations on flying.

It's kinda like the old saying "An elephant is a horse designed by a
committee." After the FAA gets through amending any EAA/AOPA
recommendations, common sense has been tossed out the window, for fear
of the inevitable "liability" issues that have so crippled our society.

After "Sport Pilot" proved to be ineffective, "Light Sport Aircraft"
were/was introduced, with simplified medical requirements and training.
Unfortunately, no one (in my area, anyway) is teaching with LSAs
(yet?), and thus that particular pilot community is not growing any
more than full-fledged Private pilots are.

(Well, except for the older Private pilots who are opting to fly LSAs
rather than risk failing their medical exam. I'm sure you've heard
about the Catch-22 of LSA, that states "You can fly without a medical
UNLESS you have been denied a medical." This has made an awful lot of
older guys simply not try for the medical, for fear that they will
fail.)

Now, of course, we'll hear from 100 guys who claim that they don't want
to share the skies with a bunch of under-trained pilots. To which I
can only say: What will we do when there are not enough of us around
to support the GA infrastructure?

FBOs and maintenance shops throughout the Midwest are barely scraping
by -- and new pilot training is not replacing all the pilots who are
dying. This is a one-way trip with a predictable and profound ending
that is (unfortunately) pulling into sight faster than any of us want
to believe. We need more pilots, and we need more aircraft owners --
and we need them NOW.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"