How to Be Successful in Flight Training

Flight training is a challenging endeavor to undergo. Whether you are working on private, instrument, or going for a type rating. Each license or rating brings new information, sometimes new aircraft, systems, pushing you out of your comfort zone. This is a good thing! One hazard in aviation training is the idea of becoming complacent, or doing something so routinley that you forgo the use of checklists, thourough preflight, or faliure to double check due to confidence in the fact that "you've done this a million times".

Learning something new, especially something so vastly different or unique such as flight training takes lots of time, dedication, and money towards it. There are many factors to why students do not succeed in their training, maybe due to learning at a slower pace (this is still ok!), mismatch with instructor, lack of resources for training, etc. Student failure cannot be attributed to one thing in particular, however, a big factor can be due to student motivation. In a training enviornment where I see many students day in and day out, a common theme with the students who a slow to progress, are those who do not take the initiative to study at home.

Do not be this student.

Instead, ask your instructor for resources to study. Use ground time with your instrucor as a review for what you know, and to polish that up, rather than for the instructor bring new information, which you could have studied at home before. Coming to grounds prepared, will help reinforce the information. Beyond the ones that they recommend, there are hundreds more out there. There is no lack of free resources for you to use as a student, and there should be no excuse to not study as a result.

Now if the information you are learning is difficult, or confusing, then it is 100% ok to ask your instructor to clarify, or reword. And obviously that is what they are there for. However, something I cannot reiterate enough is the idea that pretty much anything in aviation, is written down in a FREE resource. You will save so much time and money if you take the extra 5 minutes to look up a concept at home and study it.

Being successful starts with being independent. Yes, your instructor is there to guide you through flight training. However, your instructor should not hold your hand. It is up to you to have the initiative to study at home, chair fly, read, watch videos, make your own notes, etc. There is a reason you don't see many minimum time private pilots! It takes a lot of effort on the student part: hard work beats talent when talent fails to work.