Originally Posted by
Fl1ingfrog
So many people lead such very busy and pressured lives these days, particularly in the UK. This takes me back to a memory of one student who would arrive into the car park driving with one hand with his phone in the other. With seconds to go he would finish his call, grab his flight bag and arrive at the flight desk bang on time. At the end of his lesson within seconds he was back in his car, driving out of the car park one handed, and once again his phone in the other. That was his life.
I once had a surgeon as a flying student. I remember him taking a call on his cellphone while we were doing traffic circuits "can you take over for a moment, I have to answer this!". I overheard him say: "Is she bleeding very strongly?" ... "OK then, give her thisandthat medication, I see that I'm back within the hour to look after her myself." We did two more landings and off he went in his Porsche. Of course he never came to his lessons with any kind of preparation. So we kept doing the same exercise over and over again: Fly 15 minutes to our training airfield, perform five to ten traffic patterns, fly back home, make an appointment for the next lesson (half of which would get cancelled again) and rush off to his clinic. After half a year and no progress at all I could persuade him to take two weeks off work and do nothing else but fly during that time. It worked that way and he got his PPL, but never flew again thereafter. Obviously just a box ticked off his bucket list. Someone told be that he began racing historic cars soon thereafter.
Now I rarely instruct PPL students, mostly ATPL integrated instead. They know what's at stake and usually come well prepared. In the rare cases when not, there is not much that one can do. The planes are on a busy schedule, we usually get them for three hours at a time, which includes checks and fueling, so extending the typical half hour briefing will cut the flying time short.
Which is something I am not willing to do because 1) we get paid by flying minutes and all my briefing and debriefing time is already not paid, therefore I am not going to extend this any more whilst reducing the paid time (sounds selfish maybe, but I am not doing this for fun) and 2) because cutting the training missions short upsets the training syllabus quite a bit. So we just go and fly and I hope the student gets himself into trouble so he learns that it pays off to invest an hour before turning up at the airport.