On Tuesday, September 8, 2015 at 1:30:50 AM UTC+3, C-FFKQ (42) wrote:
On Monday, 7 September 2015 07:19:10 UTC-4, Bruce Hoult wrote:
Is anyone doing basic training in Duos? The DG1000 is just fine (especially with the 18m tips). The Duo would be no problem in the air, but unsprung undercarriage doesn't seem like a good idea for student landings.

Bruce, how many flights does it take to get to solo using the DG1000 ?

At my club, we have a youth camp of 3 weeks duration where we train using 2-33's. We solo our kids usually around 24-28 flights. The 2-33 is a tough ship and can handle the abuse, a great workhorse.

We sell a 40 flight "Pre-paid to solo" package (with disclaimer of course), but most younger people (up to 40ish?) do get there by 40 flights.

And then, of course, they're already rated in high performance glass. How many total flights does it take to train in a 2-33 and then convert to modern glass?

24 - 28 is way lower than our average even when we were using Blaniks, so perhaps we have different goals. I soloed on flight 31 (at age 22) and that was below average.

But then our field is not that huge (600m), surrounded by housing, and we do a lot of soaring flights when the opportunity arises during training including flying on gusty windy ridge/wave days when we don't expect a student (even a post-solo one) to be able to handle the tow or landing. We pretty much expect people to be able to do a 30+ minute flight as soon as they are solo, not just a quick circuit.

The number of flights to solo did increase a bit when we moved to Twin Astir (original retract ~38:1 model), though not as much as we expected, possibly because the average flight time got a lot longer. I don't think we observed any measurable difference going from Grobs to DG1000.

We put people in the PW5 after five or so solo flights in the DG1000.