Student Certificates
 

I have only been an instructor since 1968, so I've not run into the problem I am having before. I have recently collected five or six active students. By the time they get through the IACRA thing and wait until OKC gets off it's duff, they should have soloed a few weeks before. I have had one student finish his cross country training, night time, instrument time, and was ready to start the private prep before I could solo him.
I guess my question, if I have one is, is there any attempt to speed this process, or how do the rest of you handle it?
Terry Johnson

In Europe we only need the student to have a medical certificate before we can solo them, typically, around 12-15 hours though some are earlier (Mil sponsored scholarships 9 hours) and some later. No cross country, instrument or night is ever done pre solo and solo consolidation. Different ways of teaching across the pond.

This is primarily a UK/Europe forum

Whopity, I think you figure of typically 12 to 15 hours is correct with a good instructor and school, when I taught on RAF scholarships, they had to solo by ten hours, it required good planning, a put the instructor under pressure, as none of us wanted to chop the students, I don't recall chopping anyone on the 10 hour rule, but they would good calibre students who had been though OASC selection.

The problem is that I have come across many schools with students not going solo until 25+, really down to poor sylabus planning, instruction in unsuitable conditionm, frequent change of instructors and occasionaly poor aptitude. I did take this up with a few CFI's that if we were not sending students solo between ten and fifteen hours then we were doing something wrong, but it always fell on deaf ears. In part the problem was instructors getting paid by the hour, so some instructors flying was not always in the students students best interest, many down to wx conditions.

To add to your point, I did once take on a student, from an instructor who had to suddenly leave (he was knocking of one of his student's wife). I carefully checked his training record and if there was no medical in place. I did a couple of sorties with the student, he was at the circuit stage, I checked to see if he knew all the emergencies and I was completely happy with his flying.

So in the debrief, I told him that he had flown really well, and said it was a pity he didn't have a medical as I would have sent him first solo, to which he said he had already been first solo! In disbeif I checked his log book against the tech log and he had indeed been solo without a medical. His training records were incomplete included the first solo. I Felt this needed to be reported as a MOR with the CAA, but my CFI said we should keep quiet..

To add to any other requirements in the UK, in the past some schools required the student to have passed air law, there is nothing wrong with that, in the above example that might have helped, as the instructor clearly did not know what he was doing.

There seems to be a growing number of FIs who rush the basic exercises then spend all their time in the circuit, its no wonder the students struggle as they are overworked from an early stage and fail to lean how to lookout.
Since we embarked on the European route, standardisation has been abandoned and we are bogged down with bureaucracy and paperwork.

We do not have any such process so its not an issue for us, as long as they have a medical we can send them solo.

A temporary certificate is normally issued around a week after the application is submitted which can be downloaded from the student's IACRA account or from Airman Certification Online Services. The permanent card one takes about 2 months, don't wait for that.