Scudrunners

In today's world it would appear it takes around 75 hours average to get a PPL.


When I learned to fly in 1953 the Government minimum time for the license was 30 hours.


I learned to fly at Central Airways at the Toronto Island Airport which had a control tower and the airport was fairly busy most days.


So my question is were we improperly trained compared to today's pilots or was our instruction just better?


Hopefully we can toss this around and get an interesting discussion going.


I dare not start this over on the other forum because it would end up a real shit show.  :)

I don't know Chuck. I learned 12 years ago.


I would say with today's syllabus, which includes a short CC (dual then solo) a "long" CC (dual and solo), 5 solo hours in circuit, required night , required hood, then plus the rest of the exercises to standard, that all would be impossible in 30 hours.

The answer to the 100hr PPL question, is the same answer to the
ridiculously long checklist.

People are afraid to leave anything out, and efficiency doesn't even
make the top ten in flight training.

I used to provide very intense flight training.  I remember teaching
some Mooney guys to fly formation, they all barfed.  They thought
because they had an instrument rating, that they were the cock of
the walk, but they soon realized they didn't know very much about
flying their airplanes.

I don't think most people don't even [i]want[/i] good, efficient flight
training.  They just want their flight instructor to be their pal, and
tell them what a wonderful job they are doing, even when they stink.

As far as I can determine the only extra requirement that we did not have was the five hours instrument time.


Which I personally do not agree with for the purpose of getting a day only PPL but that is only my own opinion.


So that leaves an increase of an additional 10 hours more than when I learned.


From my observations of pilots when I was giving advanced flight instruction I saw far to many pilots who did not.


(1)  Understand how to taxi correctly.


(2)  Control attitude during the climb after take off.....airspeed needle chasing....


(3)  Judge height during the landing process....they did not land they arrived...


(4)  Had no idea of how to perform a x/wind landing their arrival was a semi controlled crash.


Those were the most common lack of airplane handling skills I noted and their training time was about twice what we received.


Am I being unfair in the above comments Colonel?

I think 30 hours in a "retro" aircraft, conventional gear (what a strange term now) no electrics and no radio and then once the flying skills are progressing (stick and rudder) now if one wants to get into the fancy shit start throwing modern stuff into the mix. Damn we all able to be able to get from A to B have a shit load of fun doing it and land in any farmers' field if the mood moved us (not club aircraft - I know)


I have spoken to several chief pilots recently who are now being forced to hire 250 hr IATRA F/Os into 705 fairly modern turbo props with lots of automation. I asked what program they had in place to "mature" and hone stick and rudder skills and that is their dilemma. 

[quote]I think 30 hours in a "retro" aircraft, conventional gear (what a strange term now) no electrics and no radio and then once the flying skills are progressing (stick and rudder) now if one wants to get into the fancy shit start throwing modern stuff into the mix.[/quote]


Central Airways used 4 Cessna 140's, 4  four Fleet Canucks, 1  Cessna 170 and 1 Piper Super Cruiser. ( My favourite one to fly back then. )


They all had to have radios because the Island Airport was controlled by a control tower... in fact we had ADF's in some of them for x/country training.


Maybe we learned faster because all the training airplanes were conventional gear and not those comples nose wheel trainers?

[quote](4)  Had no idea of how to perform a x/wind landing[/quote]

That's probably one of my biggest peeves.

I commuted to Europe and Africa during the last decade or so of my flying career and found it fascinating watching the crews fly the Dash 8 for Jazz on the Vancouver Nanaimo  segment of the flights.


They seldom did the final approach leg lined up with the runway and usually were not on the runway centre line period, their cross wind correction was the same as correcting for their airway track and they usually touched down happily drifting sideways with the nose pointing into wind instead of lined up with the runway centre line.


Can anyone here tell me here tell me how you can get hired by an airline and you do not even have a grasp of the basics of flying?

In this day -- simply apply -- if you have a pulse and a license you are hired

There were substantially better prepared candidates back then.  They had more mechanical experience from fixing their bicycles and building models and driving stick and whatnot, plus I kind of suspect they wanted it more.