Student Drop-Out Rates...why?

Which raises an interesting question about focusing more effort on
making an airplane that is simpler to fly.

Which is very doable - it merely requires that we give up some of our
cherished concepts about what the right way is.

Some thoughts:

Forget rudder pedals. Forget slips. Crosswind landings are made by
crabbing all the way down, then plopping the plane on the runway by
chopping the throttle. The gear will take it. It worked fine on the
Ercoupe, and it would work fine on a Cherokee. I've seen the way
students land those things in a crosswind - if they can take that, they
can take anything.

We can make it more effective by adding spoilers on the wings. They
activate when the throttle is pulled all the way out. They also
simplify glideslope control.

Navigation? What a waste of time. Every plane would have the
equivalent of a Garmin 396 (its failure would be considered an
emergency condition warranting a call to ATC for emergency handling)
and everyone would just follow the purple lines. VOR? NDB? DME?
Dead reckoning? Pilotage??? You gotta be kidding.

Weather? Why? That 396 has a satellite downlink. A little
reprogramming, and it will simply shade areas of the screed green (for
safe), yellow (for caution), or red (for hazardous) and you reroute
yourself. METAR? TAF? You gotta be kidding.

Engine failure? How often does that happen anyway? And if it does -
hey, let's just equip the planes with parachutes. If you can't get it
restarted by 2000 ft, pull the handle.

Ground reference maneuvers? Patterns? WHY? That 396 will zoom in on
the airport and guide you into a pattern entry. After all, it already
knows the winds and the traffic pattern direction. We can add
skywatch, and then it will even sequence you in with the traffic. No
transponder in the aircraft? Those guys are a hazard, shouldn't be
allowed.

With modern technology, it would be no problem to design and build
airplanes that any idiot could learn to fly in a weekend, never mind a
week. We wouldn't get the Harley crowd that way, but we might well get
the Mercedes crowd.

Michael