On Thursday, October 20, 2016 at 3:43:08 AM UTC+3, JJJ wrote:
Bruce Hoult;930688 Wrote:
What are you training in now? The same 2-33?

son_of_flubber;930692 Wrote:
I've heard that soloing at an early age makes it easier to take up the
sport later in life. It will be interesting to hear how that works out
for you.

40 years ago, I flew at Sky Sailing, Fremont. That operation is long
gone from Fremont, now operating out of 'Warner Springs'
(https://www.skysailing.com/) in SoCal. I was -this close- ---||--- to
graduating to the SGS 1-26.

I'm training in Grob G-103a's now. I'm finding it a harder plane to fly
than I remember the 2-33's being. I'm wondering if that's really true
or if it's just me. I see evidence that it's BOTH.

I've never been in a 2-33, but when my club moved from training in the 1955-era Blanik L-13 (which is a good bit higher performance than the 2-33) to the Grob 103 Twin Astir we saw the average time to solo for young people go from maybe 35 flights to 40 flights. So it's maybe a little bit harder. But mostly it's just different.

On the other hand, the "conversion to high performance glass" step later on goes from maybe 10 flights (landings, really) to a big fat zero.

When we changed from training the the Grobs to training in brand new DG1000-18 about a dozen years later I don't think we saw any difference in flights to solo at all.

Note that different organisations treat getting to solo differently. We expect people to be able to soar immediately upon getting solo, and most people have a number of flights in the middle of their training where it's too windy and/or thermally for the student to practice landings or even aerotow and the instructor says "let's go soaring for an hour or two!" and a cross-country flight ensues.