I think an immersion school that emphasized judgement and drilled into
students how little they really know and how much experience, self training,
practice, and additional dual they still need after the checkride could
produce pilots who were safer the day after than many FBO products. For
marketing reasons, FBO's often give the impression that you graduate as
Chuck Yager.

Friend o' mine passed his checkride in the morning after a sleepless night.
That evening, he took his girlfriend for a night flight in a plane without
panel lights and with only the hand mic working. Experienced pilots in our
club turned back because of thick haze. While juggling flashlight, mic,
sectionals, etc., he flew to a very busy Class B for a touch and go and
ended up flattening both mains trying to land and hold short. Gave one set
of window seaters in a 777 a real scare. Clearly, there were a few things
they didn't cover in his training.

That said, my training is recent enough that I can remember some of it. I
was always struck by how beneficial the layoff periods were. I would
sometimes come back after a month or two of not flying and find that I was
doing better than when I stopped. Things seem to settle down and take root.
I heard about military studies that showed that the ability to learn new
complex tasks drops off dramatically after about 1/2 hour. My experience
seemed to support that. Practice is a different dynamic but I think
keeping lessons where you are first learning a task should be kept to 1/2
hour.

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Roger Long