Steve Foley wrote:

Understand what and how the instrumentation works (shortcomings included)
Own all the fundamentally necessary flight gear (i.e carry-ons in flight
bag or on person)

Obtain hours in flight simulation

See Dudley's comments regarding pre-solo students and simulators.
More...enough for now.


Ye, a point I neglected to mention. We've already had one poster
here who had a disappointing discovery flight by going into it with
a severe case of overconfidence and unrealistic expectations due to
having spent so many hours 'perfecting' his technique on a simulator.

Except for the purpose of explaining how the COM and NAV radios and
instrumentation works by a CFI, simulator time should be avoided
by pre-solo students. Post solo, other than to experiment with
navigation methods, simulators should be avoided by students also.

By simulators, I am talking about the basic PC based units, not
the multi-million dollar, full motion simulators used to train
commercial pilots. But even they should not be used pre-solo.