PPL student, questions for other instructors
Hello everyone, I have a few questions about the PPL course and whether or not I'm being milked by my instructor. I am purely getting the PPL for fun, nothing related to my career at all. The most I'm going to be doing with it, is renting planes to fly around Florida.
A little background, I've got near 21 hours racked. I have not been authorized to solo yet nor have I completed the first stage check. Have not started navigation yet either.
My schedule permits me to do 3-4 lessons per week. Lately, I've been getting the feeling that my instructor has purposely been holding me back for me to spend more money. A few days back he made me do S-turns and turns around a point. When I questioned him on why we were doing this instead of doing touch n go's, he didn't really have an answer and said the winds were too heavy, when in reality they were about 7 knots.
I finished the pre-solo exam and we went over it together. He quizzed me on it. I answered about 4 questions slightly wrong out of 50. He said I needed to study more and he'd quiz me another time.
He also has this habit of telling me to come about 20 minutes early to do weight and balance and prechecklist. Then he decides to show up 20 minutes late. So I literally sit there for almost 30 minutes waiting for him. He also writes down wrong times for ground school. He charged me for 1.2 hours the last time, when he only worked with me for about 45 minutes. When I questioned him about this during payment, he laughed and said you should be happy, the quicker we finish the ground school, the quicker we can move along.
I was told by a friend of mine who has his ATPL (and has also seen my flying), that I need to keep pushing the instructor to either let me do the stage check or move on to navigation. And specifically tell him that you aren't learning anything new and you can't keep blowing money on pointless flights.
Any advice from other instructors on my situation? Should I ask for a different instructor? Should I switch schools or should I keep pushing through?