In another thread, we have been hashing out whether some pilots in training
quit flying because of a hair-raising event, such as a brush with disaster,
or getting lost.

Few ex-students seem to admit that this was a reason for quitting, but the
drop-out rate seems to be far higher than it should be, and we all need to
do our level best to get more people into flight training. The World War II
and Korean War era pilots are dropping like flies, and formerly bustling
airports, especially in the vast reaches of the MidWest and Western states,
are turning into ghost fields.

We need more pilots, pronto, or we won't have anywhere to land in 20 years!
No municipality is going to pay to keep an airport open that is used by
fewer and fewer pilots every year -- and I can't blame them.

Off the top of my head I can think of three reasons (other than being scared
out of the cockpit) for the continuing drop-out conundrum:

1. CFI shuffling - You just get comfortable with an instructor, and off to
the regionals they go, leaving you to start all over with a new CFI...
2. Airport "snobbery" -- You walk into an FBO, prepared to spend thousands,
and you feel like an alien being on a strange world.
3. No Syllabus -- Too many CFIs work off the seat of their pants, without a
formal lesson plan. This drove me nuts, when I was getting my ticket.

You'll notice I've not mentioned the Number One reason people mention for
quitting: Money. We've beaten the relative cost of flying to death, and (for
the purposes of this thread) I will just leave it at this: Learning to fly
is about as expensive as a semester of college, and less expensive than
buying a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Let's leave "cost" out of this, for
now, as I think it's safe to say that there a millions of Americans who
could easily afford to learn to fly, if the urge were to strike.

That aside, can you name some other reasons for the abysmal drop-out rate of
student pilots? What can we do to make flying more accessible to those
who dream of piloting an aircraft?
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"