PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - How long after passing PPL does it take to get more confident?
Old 19th September 2025 | 16:46
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Pilot DAR
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Joined: Aug 2006
: CPL
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From: Ontario, Canada
Yes, you'll benefit from riding right seat, actively participating in navigation and radio work. Those are skills you can built as well, if not better while not actually flying the plane! Certainly, some of my trips with two of us have been swapping seats for each leg, and I learned lots while not flying!

Keep raising your own standards of "good" flying. Everything you do, always ask yourself if it could have been done more gently, with more grace, or more precision. Leave silly short takeoff and landing stuff until later, focus on precision and grace first. But, always note mistakes you think you made, and commit to doing better next time. Indeed, occasionally, while landing here at home, I'll do a poor landing. Nearly always, I'll do a circuit or two right away, to leave my last landing of the day a better one.

As for confidence, don't get more confident, let your skill grow, but not your complacency! Sometimes when I takeoff on my own in a type which is new to me, particularly a clients test aircraft, I am genuinely concerned about damaging it. I want everything I do while flying it to stand up to a question if something goes wrong. Indeed, a few years ago, when I had brought my client's prototype modified DHC-2 Beaver to Ontario, I did not fly it into my runway at home - there was just no excuse for doing that were something to have gone wrong. Instead I based it at a local airport while it was in my care. I'm okay feeling nervous while flying, I will leave it to the owners of the airplanes I fly to judge if I am competent in them!

You will find as you build skill and improve your precision, that peripheral aspects of the flying will become more clear to you, because the core flying tasks become muscle memory, but you're hundreds of hours from that, so don't rush it! The only things that you have to prove right now are that you are worthy of the trust placed in you to fly someone's airplane, and that you know that you have more to learn, and skills to build, and you're going to do that!

Welcome to PPRuNe!
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