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Old January 5th 04, 03:20 AM
C J Campbell
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I would not only drop the time to solo block, but also the trainer N-number.
Students often fly several different aircraft or even types of aircraft
before they get their ticket. Now, what you might do, is if you made it a
kind of electronic log book where students could enter each flight, or
perhaps a group of flights, then they could enter what plane they flew in
for each flight.

If you did that, you would be able to show time to completion automatically,
perhaps as a graph. Other useful information would be number of canceled
flights due to maintenance, weather, or the instructor cancelling. The
amount of night and actual and simulated IFR would be interesting, too,
along with cross country and time as PIC, score on the written test, and
whether you passed the check ride each time.

I would also like to see what syllabus is used -- Jeppesen, Sporty's,
Cessna, King, ASA, or whatever, and whether the same syllabus was used for
both ground and flight training. Another thing, is this a part 61 or part
141 school, and what did the student do there? I believe the age of the
student and of the instructor also have a bearing.

And if you end up keeping the aircraft information, maybe something on the
age of the aircraft, whether it had an ADF, DME or GPS, etc. As long as I am
asking for all this stuff, how about information on the student's prior
flight experience, whether he has other family members that fly, and whether
he owns the airplane he learned in, as well as the student's aviation goals.

Since a lot of students end up having more than one instructor, how about
information on time flown with each instructor? How much of the time was
spent on stage/progress checks? Did the student attend more than one flight
school? Did he spend 100 hours making no progress, finally switch to a good
instructor, and then will he tag the good instructor on your database with
70 hours to solo, 110 hours to completion?

Now, you did ask for training airspace, which I assume to mean the airspace
of the home airport, but a lot of airports are very constricted and you
might have to transit more restrictive airspace on every flight. OTOH, you
might fly out of some class C airport, but do little or no work there -- all
of your training is actually done at a nearby class G field. Elevation of
the training airport would be interesting, too. Actually, I would like to
see the name of the training airport.

Also, it is one thing to write your instructor certificate number in
somebody's logbook, where not many people will bother to look at it. It is
quite another to post somebody's SSN your web site. Yes, I know that you can
get a different number, but a lot of instructors have not done that or else
they have older students who have the old number.

Anyway, that is a start of what I can think of for now. If I come up with
any other comments I will let you know.