Originally Posted by
John Farley
Perhaps! But you and I must admit that without the arrogance of youth aviation (or the world) would hardly be where it is today - so good luck to ma11achy.
The world is, I suppose, full of people who enjoyed the training environment so much, they want to stay in it. Teachers, Professors, flying instructors, outdoors sports instructors...
The risk is that you get a significant number of those who haven't in between times gone off and done a lot of "real" activity - whether it's flying of climbing mountains. Teacher training colleges nowadays, are rightly very reluctant to take straight graduates as trainee teachers - they want somebody who has spent significant time doing a different job, raising a family - the stuff that made us all grow up.
The problem clearly with flying, is that it's very hard as an inexperienced pilot, to get anybody else to pay for that "growing up flying" (I'm sure that somebody did for John, and to an extent for me too - but we're probably in a minority in that regard). Also, in flying you may have a single instructor from ab-initio to PPL, which is quite unique compared to most other areas of human activity, where you may well have multiple teachers/instructors through your education.
I'm not sure I see a solution to this, but it makes the idea of going rapidly from new-PPL to new-FI particularly problematic.
G