Mine was at about 16 hours seven days into a residential course and I'd also had a couple of hours on a completely different aircraft at another club. Maybe at 40 I was a slower learner than some but one thing I remember the instructor saying afterwards was that he wouldn't send anyone solo until they'd made enough bad landings to learn from their mistakes.
I don't remember the hours to first solo seeming that important at the time and they were completely irrelevant once I'd got my licence. Fortunately unlike my earlier brief experience of gliding, the group I was training with were non-competitive, we wanted to encourage each other to fly.
It was much the same with the hours to PPL. Once I'd got it the hours it had taken to get it were just part of my flying experience.
Apparently quite a lot of people give up flying once they've done their first solo.
Last edited by 150commuter; 12th Aug 2012 at 11:16.