Student night solo?

First, night training, like instrument training, should be done
towards the end of the training cycle,

Of course everything should be done at the end of training but when
some students take 2 years to get through their private, its hard to
do everything the month before the checkride. Its just the reality of
the training env we are in. People plan to fly once a week but work,
weather, family get in the way and its not unusual for students to be
gone for over a month. Since night isn't tested in actual on the
checkride, CFIs tend to focus on the things the DE will be asking them
the next month.


-Robert

(Robert M. Gary) wrote
Of course everything should be done at the end of training

Well, no. Slow flight and stalls should be done at the beginning.
Ground reference maneuvers should be done at the beginning. Steep
turns should be done at the beginning. Those things develop the
student's ability to feel the airplane (primarily for trim), fly a
pattern, and land the airplane, and that comes first.

Visits to other airports should be done in the middle. Pilotage, dead
reckoning, and VOR navigation should be done in the middle. Daytime
XC should be done in the middle.

And the advanced topics - instrument and night - should be done at the
end.

Since night isn't tested in actual on the
checkride, CFIs tend to focus on the things the DE will be asking them
the next month.

And once again, I have a problem with this. If the DE won't be
testing it, that means you should be paying more, not less, attention
to it. You're not training the student to pass a checkride, you're
training him to exercise the privileges of the certificate.

If his turns around a point are sloppy, so what? The point was to
teach him to fly a ground track so he could fly a reasonable pattern.
If this has happened, the maneuver has served its purpose. The WORST
that can possibly happen is that it's bad enough on that particular
day that he busts - and that's a reach. If his night flying skills
are sloppy, really bad things can happen when dinner at the in-laws
runs late...

Michael