Obviously getting a pilot’s license takes a lot of training, both classroom and behind-the-wheel (so to speak).
Is the academic portion of the training all that rigorous? I flunked out of college physics, but I flunked out of a lot of college classes, for reasons having little to do with my intelligence. How does the instruction in flight training compare to, say, a college introductory physics course?
Actually flying the aircraft-- is it a constant, never-ending series of split-second calculations, with horrifying consequences if you go wrong? Or are modern private aircraft pretty easy to fly?
You don’t need anything more than basic algebra to fly a small airplane. A lot of it is working with formulas already worked out, you just plug in various variables (weight for that trip, or gas for that trip, or current temperature and wind conditions) and go.
Pretty easy to fly. There are some parts of the flight where more attention is required, such as take-offs and landings, and you always have to be alert for traffic, monitoring your aircraft, and so forth, but it’s not arduous. There is certainly some time during cruise to look around and enjoy yourself.
In general, the newer the airplane the easier it is to fly. The hard part of flight training isn’t learning how to make the machine go where you point it, it’s learning how to handle emergencies.
Yes, there is a potential for things to go horribly wrong - you can say that about automobiles and bicycles, too. A lot of being a good pilot is learning how to avoid trouble in the first place.
You can go to your local flight school and talk to them about an “intro ride”, which is a genuine flight lesson. Typically, you’ll get a bit of ground school, enough so you know what’s going on and your role on the flight, then go out to the airplane. A lot of the time the instructor will do the actual take off, but once you’re up in the air you’ll get to use the controls, steer, turn, maybe do a bit of sight-seeing, then head back to the airport. The instructor will do the landing for you. It will give you a chance to see how everything works and a taste of doing the actual flying.
I am not a pilot and my only experience with this sort of thing is flight simulation programs for the PC. However, I have had a few friends over the years who were pilots.
I can’t answer the first part, but for the second part, what I have been told is that most planes are aerodynamically stable. Once you get them trimmed properly, they pretty much just go without a whole lot of effort on your part. The exceptions to this are high performance acrobatic planes, which are intentionally designed to be less aerodynamically stable so that they get better acrobatic performance.
Modern fighter jets are also designed to be aerodynamically unstable, again for performance reasons. They use fancy computerized flight controls to handle the instability. Even with all of its fancy computer controls, the stealth fighter has still earned itself the nickname the Wobbly Goblin.
Small planes can get blown around by the wind pretty good, but other than that, they are fairly easy to fly (again, according to my friends - I’ve never personally flown one).
My friends have also told me that while buying a plane isn’t too bad financially, the required maintenance on them is a real bitch. This is a good thing from a safety viewpoint, but from a financial viewpoint it can be a bit painful. None of my flying friends are multi-millionaires though, or even close to it. They were basically able to afford airplanes with a salary in the same range as mine.
Basic flight is quite easy. My wife got me an introductory lesson for my birthday, and it was great. I had spent a lot of time on computer flight syms, and though it’s nothing like flying IRL, it did give me a grounding in basics. One thing is that the pilot wanted me to fly by eyeball, not use the instruments, but I was already accustomed to flying by instruments (because a home flight sym doesn’t give you any of the visceral sensation of flying) so I kept looking at my VSI to see if I was flying level, rather than using the horizon outside the windows. I flew almost the entire time, in a Cessna 150, I think – high wing, tricycle landing gear. The only time the instructor took the controls was right after we took off (from Boeing Field in Seattle) so we could make a quick exit from the busy field’s flight paths. Then we just flew out over Puget Sound, buzzed my house, and generally had a wonderful flight. Blue sky, puffy white clouds, picture perfect. I landed it too. Good times.
When I had my pilots license I knew a girl who flew solo in a Cessna 152 with 10 hours total flight time. I’m pretty sure it could be done in less time.
A few people have actually flown C150’s and C172 without training, usually either first reading the manual or observing others doing it, and landed safely. Needless to say, this is NOT recommended, but it does illustrate that for airplanes they really are easy to fly.
While basic steering is fairly straightforward, it takes a fair amount of practice to do it well. In steering a plane, you can turn the plane about all three axes more-or-less independently of one another: pitch (nose up/down), yaw (nose side-to-side) and roll (one wing up, the other wing down). For most efficient flying, you have to do all three of these motions at once, in the proper proportions to one another (called “coordinated” flying), which takes some practice.
Both the classroom ground school and hands-on practice are far more “in depth” than your typical high-school driver education and driver training classes. You study the principles of how airplanes work; a modest bit about how aircraft engines work; you learn to do a pre-flight inspection before every flight (how often to you pre-flight your car before you go for a spin?), because if something fails you can’t always just pull over to the curb. You study navigation and wind-triangles (helps of you learned some trigonometry), meteorology (like how to “read” various cloud formations); and a lot of time studying the FAR’s (Federal Aviation Regulations).
The hand-on instruction includes a lot of practice of unusual or even emergency procedures: Stalls, spins, power-off landings, basic instruments (how to recover from odd attitudes, only looking at the instruments, and not looking out the windows). When I took gliding lessons, we also practiced rope breaks at various low altitudes. (That’s when the tow rope breaks just as you’re taking off.) We also practiced low approaches, where you find yourself coming in for a landing at too low an altitude – Which served me well, as on my second solo flight, I found that the altimeter was sticky and didn’t tell the truth.
And some of us take a little longer. For me, it was just over 21 hours. It’s not that flying was hard - it’s that I couldn’t master landings. Then my instructor had a flash of inspiration and suggested I sit on a cushion. Bingo! It was literally all in my point of view!
Oh, and for me it wasn’t a 152, it was a 150. This was in 1974. I got my license on my 21st birthday.
It’s pretty much like driving a car. There’s a stick that makes you go and a turny-pushy thing that makes you turn. It’s really not that hard.
Ground school isn’t difficult, either. If you could plan a road trip in the car, knowing beforehand where to stop for gas and what radio station plays your kind of music, then you could make a flight plan.
Hard? Depends on what you want to do. Fly a C-150 locally or fly a 85 HP swift? A single engine turbo prop?
Study a lot? Fly big airliners or big military airplanes.
Responsibility? You are the end of the line, you are responsible for everything. There is no other person to blame for 99% of the bad things that can & do happen.Their are no signs, you have to know how, where, when to do this or that, get to here or there.
As suggested, go try it out. May be just the thing for you and may come easy. You may fall in love. You may say, “Meh.”
It’s hard – as it should be. There is a lot of information to learn in ground school. Steering straight and level once you’re in the air is easy. What’s hard is navigating, landing, take-off, and the emergency procedures.
It’s NOT like driving a car. If something goes wrong while you’re on the road, you pull over and fix it or get help. If something goes wrong (or you make a mistake) in the air, you’re potentially dead. Period.
Way back when I got my license, decades ago, it was expensive. It must be much, much more so now, with fuel prices being what they are.
Cost of the plane, cost to keep it in a hanger, cost of gas, cost of insurance, cost of maintenance.
Plus the things are not very comfortable. Unless you go for the big bucks they are basically a small compact car with limited luggage space and try riding in one of those for 2-3 hours or more.
Planes are fine for what they are - a good place to get up and enjoy the sights.
A sister of a colleague of mine who is a fighter pilot told me that learning to fly the basic trainer was easier then learning to drive a car. And learning to fly her fighter was also fairly easy after the Advanced Jet Trainer. Apparently the real problem was going to intermediate and Advanced Trainers.
The book work isn’t that hard. To actually get a license requires knowing quite a lot of regulations which is more memorization than anything.
As to flying, I doubt most people could hop in a Cessna 172 (or similar) with zero instruction and even start the engine, but once it is running, most people could probably get it into the air. Landing is obviously the most difficult part - especially if there is a crosswind.
There is generally a lot more going on when flying compared to driving a car and for example, I would never listen to music when I am flying. But in some ways less precision is required when flying. Driving down the freeway you can drift maybe 2 feet left or right without too much worry, but no more than that. In an airplane at cruise, drifting half a mile is usually no problem (just sloppy flying). In many cases you can just wander wherever you want… altitude is more critical in these cases.
Of course landing is different and that takes more skill than anything you might do in a car.