Whenever I send early solos I am standing in the tower next to the controller!
I know rules may be different elsewhere but if I cannot be in the tower watching I would not send him/her!
All my sympathies go out to all concerned in the Southend tragedy especially the instructor who authorised.
I have not read the full report yet but students should be fit and trained in every respect for the task on the day. This is a huge responsibility for the instructor but this is, in my opinion, exactly what the job is all about. You can go on as long as you like about external circumstances such as ATC instructions, the weather, traffic conditions etc but before you send early solos the one thing you are looking for is that the student has enough spare capacity to make a decision and extricate himself from a situation which may require a go around or recovery from incipient stall/spin, for example. Rather than being able to fly a good approach and landing every time I am looking to the student being able to recognise an approach which is going wrong and make a decision to go around.
Just scanned the report - whichever way you look at it this was accident was primarily a stall/spin near the ground. I find the report quite disappointing with lots of referral to the ATC rules and little comment on the flying training aspects. S##t sometimes happens but I also was quite shocked to see this student's lack of recency in the last 28 days. For one reason or another the student failed to recognise the signs of an approaching stall, the symptoms of the full stall and failed to recover! I know I may have to take the brickbats for this but sometimes the truth hurts - this points to a lack of training in stall/spin awareness etc and I feel the ATC aspect is just al oad of hot air!
My hallucination is that a lot of flying training now suffers from the "tick in the box mentality". It's become a list of things to do etc. When I reflect on my father who was a veteran instructor/examiner the one thing he taught more than anything else was an "attitude" rather than conforming to a set of "rules".
Last edited by fireflybob; 14th Jul 2007 at 18:44.