Experience Question

My question to you folks is simply, how long did you
all wait before you decided it was safe to fly with your family?

I think I had my private all of two weeks before I took my parents on a
weekend trip, New Jersey to Pennsylvania. We had friends there, and
the round trip of just under 4 hours in the rental C-172 eliminated a
round trip drive of over 10 hours in the family car. Of course at that
point I had already flown that rental C-172 from Indiana to New Jersey,
but I was still well under 100 hours.

I felt very comfortable and very safe making that weekend trip. The
weather was good VFR, it was a pleasant day in late spring, I had it
all planned out and hit every checkpoint, and I felt proud of myself
for spotting the nondescript little strip in Pensylvania, and for the
way I handled the busy Sunday afternoon arrival into Caldwell. The
plane performed flawlessly, flying the entire trip without a hiccup.
Truly it could not have been any better.

In retrospect, while I think the trip from Indiana to New Jersey days
after getting the ticket was great, taking the family on that weekend
jaunt wasn't such a hot idea. That was over a decade and over 2000
hours ago, and my perspective on proficiency is a little different now
than it was then. In other words - I know how little I knew, how
poorly maintained the plane was, how much riskier that flight was
(compared to driving in the family car), and how poorly I communicated
this risk to my parents.

Was the risk acceptable? To me, certainly. To my mother? She avoids
driving at night or in bad weather as much as possible to reduce the
risk, which is small by aviation standards. Would she have gone had
she understood how bad the risk really was? I doubt it. Driving is
the most dangerous thing most people do, but it is much safer than
personal flying by any reasonable statistical measure, regardless of
how you may feel about it.

Some say the good lord protects fools and madmen, and thus he must
surely protect the newly minted private pilots, hours still in two
digits, who pile the family into the airplane and take off.

So if not right after getting the ticket, when? Well, here's how I
look at it. I don't much enjoy flying in the back seat of a GA
airplane, but I'll do it for transportation. In the back seat, my
experience and proficiency means little - I have no accees to the
controls, and so I am at the mercy of the pilot. I think nothing of
getting into the back seat of a car with a stranger, but I won't do the
same with an airplane - the risk is much greater. Every pilot is
different, but there are quite a few that I know that I would get into
the back seat. Only one has less than 300 hours (I'm not sure he even
has 100), and he had unusually high quality training (I believe the
average experience level of the instructors who taught him was 5000+
hours).

From what I've observed, most pilots will begin to understand their
limitations and the limitations of their aircraft (really understand
them, not just imagine them to be arbitrarily restrictive) somewhere
around the 300-600 hour mark, if ever. That's how long it takes for
them to scare themselves enough times. That's also about the point
where they gain a level of proficiency that makes it seem reasonable to
me to put my life in their hands, again if they're ever going to reach
it. My experience is also that a pilot who hasn't reached that point
in 600 hours isn't ever going to, unless he commits to long term,
intensive, high-quality training. This is highly uncommon in personal
aviation. I suspect it's because at that point the habit patterns are
set, and the pilot is either so conservative he has no idea where his
limits really are because he's never encountered them, or so reckless
that he sees every mistake he got away with as further proof that he is
the latest incarnation of Chuck Yeager. I won't fly with either kind -
the latter because I'm all too likely to be there when he says "Hey,
y'all, watch this" and the former because when the truly unexpected
happens to him (and it will), he will have no idea how to cope.

Having said all that - they're your kids. You make decisions about
what is and what is not safe enough for them all the time. Just
remember that when they get to be teenagers and want to drive (or ride
motorcycles), if you forbid it on the basis of safety you really
haven't a leg to stand on.

Michael