Thought I'd give my tuppence worth - just to balance the scores, because this has become something of a willy waggling thread - you know the sort, I did my solo the night before I got to the airfield, in my sleep
I know at the club I am learning to fly - PPL(A) - there are those who solo after 10 hours (usually they already have glider / UL experience) or others who take more time - in one case it's because they leave too much time between lessons, meaning they "forget" what they have learnt, others are simply slower - like me
For info, I have always had a fear of flying and decided to learn to fly to combat this; my fear of flying is because of the fear that the pilot *ucks up - if you imagine driving a car on ice, one wrong move and the car is in the ditch. My rationale was in thinking that the pilot has to react in turbulent weather / storms - one wrong move and the plane crashes. But as we all know, the plane does most, if not all, of the work and yes, it has helped - I feel much more comfortable when flying scheduled airliners, no more panicking when the door closes!
But back to the topic - I soloed after 27 hours - so no, am not a "super hero", nor can I be considered a natural flyer. At the same time, during my first solo I had a Mike "jump" in front of me as I was downwind shortly before turning base meaning I faced circling to add some separation or trying some slow flying - I chose the latter and that gave me a huge boost in my confidence, knowing that I could keep a 172 in the air at 60 knots, holding a steady altitude in the circuit without an instructor telling me what to do; I hate to think what I would have done had I not had the extensive training I received. The second solo came as rather an anti-climax - climb out, accelerate to cruising speed, slow down, flaps down, land...... ;-)
Since then have just passed my ground exams and will be making my solo cross country runs shortly, have 2 hours circuit training solo and just over 36 hours in my book including all exercises which can be done with an instructor, I hope to be ready to take my final exam with 50 hours in my book.
Sorry for the rather lengthy posting but I wanted "Joe Average" to see that there are people out there who take longer to go solo but they shouldn't feel demotivated by this. And just because your time to solo takes longer, doesn't necessarily mean that your time to PPL will be excessively long.....
