School methods and landings
 

Hi Everyone,

I am here almost in tears. Have been on the road to PPL since August 2020. Lots of stop-and-go because of lockdowns. I have about 30 hours but very inconsistent flying as I did not fly at all between November 20 and March 21 with the lockdown.

I have passed all theory and radio with ease and I fly well. I am not struggling with turns, keeping altitude, nor with navigation. However, I have not been cleared to fly solo due to landings. I am extremely frustrated as, though not perfect, I can land and for the most part keep my speeds.

I have not had one instructor consistently but, instead, my school keeps giving me a different one every time and also changing them in the last minute (happened just this morning). There has been no master plan for the practical training, no one sat with me to tell me what I should achieve by when, there is no guidance on how much I should fly. I keep trying to figure this all out on my own.

I have asked them to book me with one or two instructors only for the sake of someone keeping (and hopefully caring about) track of my progress. However, I was told that this is best and their way of teaching is to switch instructors. I think they are just milking me and do not care about my progress. I am a quick learner and normally pick things up very quickly. What to do?

Thank you in advance for any guidance or words of wisdom.

Consistency is important with an instructor that you get on with. However, I found having a different instructor occasionally they gave a different perspective on some items which was beneficial. Sounds like you already know what is happening to you there!

Do your instructors share with you what they've written in your student records? That will give you clues as to what you need to do to get your landings right - especially if you find that several different instructors all say the same thing!
Don't worry too much about not getting the landings right - lots of students who are otherwise good learners get stuck at this stage, then one day it just "clicks". In my experience the most typical faults are:
1. Unnecessary aileron inputs on short final, leading to inability to stay on the centreline (solution: keep wings level; use your feet only for directional control)
2. Not completing key tasks (full flap; RT call; final checks) early enough, leading to overload/distraction from keeping to the glidepath (solution: get configured and accurately trimmed for the speed as early as you can)
3. Insufficiently consistent and accurate visual scan (should be "Runway numbers - airspeed - runway numbers - airspeed" all the way down final, with small power adjustments in response to changes in flightpath)
NS

There is an old joke in aviation:
I’ll teach you how to fly for $50, I’ll teach you how to land for $9,950 ( or whatever higher amount)

Landings are by far the hardest thing to learn.
This is where Human Factors and a little psychology comes in.
Frustration is self perpetuating, it keeps itself alive and growing.
You go into a lesson anxious for progress and because of it, there isn’t. This increases the level of frustration and the cycle continues.

You MUST ACCEPT that landings are the hardest things to learn, stop blaming other people and circumstances and just go with the flow.
Its a matter of time and practice and eventually everyone can put the pieces together.
I have personally had students that soloed at 40+ hours and I’ve had students solo at less time. Everything in between also.
Overall in the big scheme of things learning how to land and how quickly does not determine how good of a pilot you’ll become.
Really it doesn’t. Flying is 90% a mental game like chess.

Sit down, breathe, accept and calm down.

That on top of continuity in trainings je consistency in critique.
You have to understand that your instructors are probably part time with a second (third?) job to pay the bills and they nay simply not be available when you are.
Talk to an instructor that you feel is helpful and ask if they can contact you when they are available so you can be put on their schedule.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Indeed, I have seen the notes. The issue seems to be the timing of flare and then setting down. The problem is that one day I will fly with one instructor and he/she would say “lift more, you do not lift enough.” The next day another instructor would say - “you lift too much.” I pretty much do the same thing so it is counter-intuitive to me to understand the difference in advice. I must admit though that I do find the plane rather heavy.

No, the instructors are not part time. We are in Europe, the school is staffed by full-time instructors.

I am not “blaming other people” per se. I do, however, expect consistency because all friends who are pilots have largely trained with one instructor who was invested in their progress and gave them guidance. This is very much not the case here and I find it difficult.

I will take the advice to breathe and calm down - that is solid! 😊

Flyingheels.

As Northsouth says, get the drills and flap selection out of the way in plenty of time.
Then TRIM OUT at your constant approach speed/steady power setting.
At the flair, where are you looking ? DON’T look at the touchdown area once you’re over the threshold. Just fly the aeroplane towards the far end of the runway. Leave the power alone and gently hold off.......hold off......hold off. As the speed decays, don’t trim any further and you will touch down ahead, close the throttle and just keep straight. When you’re happy you are still in control, GENTLY apply the brakes. Etc etc.

Perhaps the most important thing I was told when learning to land was 'following round out try to keep the plane flying without adding power. It will then land itself when it's good and ready.'

Some you'll grease and some you won't and nor should you expect to.

Fly the correct approach speed from the POH. Not the approach speed from POH plus 5 knots plus 5 knots plus 5 knots plus 5 knots. Watch king schools you tube training video on landings. You will be sorted. Then watch the rest of their videos!

Flying Heels,

Your dilemma is sadly all too common. I have given ground lessons to many people in your situation and they have all gone solo shortly after. It is all down to technique and if your instructors do not understand this themselves they will never impart it to you. You can PM me if you wish for the possibility of a telephone call.

MM

Rule #1
You can’t learn how to land from reading.
This is a brain-hand-eye-feet coordination skill and the one and ONLY thing that works is practice.

You learn from trial and success. Not trial and error. Two or three instructors is about the right number, instructors are human and can have a bad day. However, you need to accept that your opinion may be wrong.
Have you asked if you can video a flight? Fixed camera, of course. Get your instructor to demo an approach first, then continue with the lesson. Watch the video and see what is different when you do it.
You might also ask to take a break from circuits and do some navigation, then go back to the circuit.
Remember it's supposed to be fun.

Consistency is tricky

i’ve only got 500 hours under my belt although almost all of my flying is on the same type (C150), and most landings to the same strip.

So I ought to be reasonably consistent

but one day the wind is 110/15 the next it’s
80/05. Sometimes it gusts.

sometimes I have a passenger, oftentimes I don’t

sometimes I’m coming in with 20% fuel, sometimes 80%

sometimes the grass is wetter/softer than others.

sometimes I land perfectly sometimes I don’t (and beat myself up about it). Luckily so far I’ve walked away from every landing and been able to fly the plane again

and the hardest thing is that occasionally I find myself making lengthy XC flights, sometimes IFR. So you get to the end of a three hour stint, lowish on fuel, mentally challenged by the navigation and instrument flying, needing a pee and you still have to do the most difficult thing of all…

Keep at it, one day it clicks. It doesn’t matter whether that is 10 hours or 40 hours so long as you get there

Yes from your description it sounds like there's no one driving the ship of your training, and you're getting disconnected haphazard (and contradictory) advice.

First, in the way of bad advice, to address one piece from this thread: it was mentioned that the ailerons' job is to keep the wing level, and this is not true. Their job is to maintain your straight-ahead track down the centerline, which may or may not mean keeping the wings level! Depending on crosswind (even tiny amounts, which change second to second) this will require small aileron inputs, resulting in barely-visible bank changes. Keeping the path straight with the ailerons, allows the rudder to do its job (which is completely separate and independent) of keeping the nose pointed straight (not the path, only the pointing).

If you do the incorrect thing and keep the wings level using the ailerons, this leaves both jobs of path and pointing to the rudder, which is often an impossible task to do both, and you have to choose one or the other. So the right way is ailerons to control path, and rudder to do the pointing. Now both tasks can be accomplished simultaneously.

Now for your landing question. Of course it's impossible to really see, but what I'm about to describe is a common issue, and the contradictory advice you quoted ("do not lift enough"/"lift too much") points to it. A lot of people are never taught what to actually look for/target in their flare, and are left to shoot in the blind with some sort of scripted sequence of increasing pull force, starting from a hopefully repeatable initial condition (flare height/speed, etc.) But if the initial condition varies even a tiny bit (say, arrived at the flare with a bit higher speed) or one of a number of other things varies later during the flare (catch a gust, or accidentally twitch your hand and pull more than you intended, etc.) that scripted pull sequence results in a balloon. Or, if the changes were the other way, you land too hard/early. How to react to that? If you were never taught what to target, and just do the monkey see/monkey do repetition thing, you've got no clue on how to improve. If you're observant and you think "I ballooned, I should flare less next time" that's a good mental attitude in observing the error and applying a correction for next time... but it's a naive reaction in this case, because the error was a result of a specific combination of the multitude of factors that was only in effect for THAT particular landing. And maybe in your next flare, you won't have that combination, or you'll have the opposite combination (you'll have too little speed where the last one had too much, or you'll catch a down gust where the last flare had an up gust.)

Another way to think of it is like this: Driving to work every day, do you stay on the road by memorizing every turn and turning the steering wheel by a scripted sequence of turns to match, which can be accomplished blindfolded if successful? Of course not, but the elevator equivalent to this, is too often the thing that pilots end up doing by being taught to "pull more/pull less" with no target reference.

So if you can't react to the last landing, and if the initial conditions don't allow for enough repeatability to do a scripted pull, then what do we do? Track a target! Namely, your height above the ground, which should always be decreasing and never increasing. And in the last few seconds, you can simplify away "not decreasing" to simply "flying constant height," (which does not mean constant attitude!) and it will come down and touch the ground anyway. You have to be constantly conscious of what's happening to your height, and constantly be making QUICK but SMALL corrections to what it's doing. If you start going down? Increase the pull. Stop going down at all? Or even worse, going up? Decrease the pull! These evaluations and corrections should be happening at least a few times per second. It may seem obvious, but it's not. So many times, the airplane will start ballooning up and up, and the student is oblivious and continues pulling, because that pull increase is part of their scripted sequence. It will never work. You have to be constantly and immediately RE-active to all these changes. To be clear, yes you should also try to give yourself the most repeatable starting conditions, but that, given all the possible following variations and upsets, will not nearly be enough. So you're not using a scripted sequence of turns on your steering wheel to match the road, but rather you're constantly watching how your actual position is doing compared to the desired position, and correcting accordingly.

Lastly, the "Rule #1" from a few posts up, which is woefully incomplete. It is BOTH a reading exercise and a brain-eye-hand-feet coordination exercise. If you're just out there shooting in the blind hoping for lucky results, and then trying to repeat those few diamonds in the rough, it's hopeless. You have to understand the concepts behind WHAT you're tracking and HOW you're tracking it, and internalize those into your brain (under the comfort and lack of competing tasks, of being outside the cockpit) for you to have a chance to then engage those concepts under the physical reality of actually doing it.

It really is not that complicated.

Advise to OP is simple. Take your concerns and questions, all of which are valid, to the CFI at your school. They either listen and apply themselves and you gain. Or they don't and you leave for somewhere else.

Long times between lessons is not the best way to learn. If you have the time and money, bite the bullet and book a week where you can fly a couple of times per day (weather permitting). You will soon master it, plus you won’t spend the first half of each lesson going over what you did in the previous one.

If you think that you are being given conflicting advice between different instructors, bring them together and discuss it with them. They are there to help you.

This.

At my first flying school I had an instructor who was more concerned about progressing his career through flying traffic surveys and earning money as a casino dealer than instructing.

As a result I couldn’t get the continuity required (many broken appointments and reschedules) and spent too much of each lesson relearning what I had forgotten due to breaks in training.

I remember vividly the day I turned up for a lesson and the instructor being elsewhere. The CFI was most unhappy and made a call on speakerphone. I did the rest of my training at that school with the CFI himself and later left for a larger mob.

Completely changed my experience at that school and went on to bigger and better things.

Should’ve spoken to the CFI earlier.

Good Luck!

Most learners who struggle with flare don't look in the right place. You should be looking slightly ahead of the aircraft. If you're looking straight below the nose, you will flare too late. If you're looking to the far end of the runway, you'll likely flare too high. This one is applicable to any aircraft, light or transport.

In 1964, after soloing in 3 hours on a taildragger biplane (with solo glider experience), my landings deteriorated. My instructor chopped the lesson, saying he didn't know what to do. Later that day I flew with a more experienced instructor, who'd been briefed.
Took-off, at a few hundred feet he took control, flew a low circuit, and handed me control for final. Another bad landing. Repeated 3 times. No comment from him. He now knew what I was doing wrong, and told me what to do to fix it.
A few more landings to be sure I was fixed, and I was back with my previous instructor for most of the rest of my 30 hours PPL. After allowing my PPL to lapse for 20 years, I had instruction to regain it.
What you need is a few flights with good, briefed, instructor, who can spot what YOU are doing wrong. And no long breaks. I did the PPL residential at Thruxton from 27/7 to 21/8 1964.

Being prepared to fly with two Instructors is reasonable. You have said that your school only employs full time instructors so this should be achievable. When a student is being taught by two instructors it is critical that each understands the standards taught and learned with the other and therefore each is clearly in tune with your progress. It is fundamental that there are no contradictions in standards from the instructors. The CFI/HOT should ensure consistency. You have a right to expects all this.

It is simple, they provide this to you or you leave and learn where they do. All the rest will then take care of itself. Most instructors do care and do a good job. Bad eggs unfortunately do it exists but they are easy to spot.

Flyingheels There has been a lot of good technical advice here on how to land, but as has also been said you can't really learn to land from reading about it.

Practice is the thing but, as I see it, consistent practice ably educated by one, or at the most two, competent instructors is crucial, as I think you've identified.

I well recall when I was learning, many years ago, experiencing just the same frustrations as you with different instructors telling me quite different things. 'Leave you hand on the throttle', 'don't leave your hand on the throttle' etc etc.

I did not think this ok and said so. Ultimately I insisted that I fly with just one instructor that I was happy with, except for certain checkouts required along the way, and things went a lot more smoothly from there.

Given I was the customer (and had a few clues around learning/teaching techniques) such a request did not seem unreasonable to me. Perhaps you could have a similar discussion with the head of your school? There is a time and place to be firm and while the interruptions are not the school's fault, inconsistent teaching techniques are, and as the person on the receiving end of that you should tell them. Up to you how to do that but being firm doesn't necessarily mean being stroppy; what you want is a partnership with the school and someone at that school who can help you achieve your goal, and the trick is to convey that in a way that doesn't brook argument.

If that doesn't bring something you're happy with are there other schools/clubs nearby that you could trial?

Yes, the big break has not helped but most replies have ignored this part:

This isn't good. Constantly changing instructors isn't acceptable (see below) and It's their job to set the goals WITH you. They can't really give an exact 'achieve this by such and such' but should be able to give an overview based on normal progression.

That's a valid request and a rubbish response. Actually that's an outright lie as a response. No-one learns better by constantly changing instructor. As you've requested and others have noted, one or two others in addition to your primary is acceptable, otherwise they are milking you and/or they don't care- find another school.

Ask your instructor to show you a landing again. I have the impression, that after very few demonstrations most students are almost always in control during landing and don´t get to see a proper landing including real-time explanation anymore. Don´t be afraid of letting the instructor do the landing on your money, it´s well spent.

We teach to approach at a shallow angle, more or less 3deg, using a bit of power. Much easier that the power-off approaches that some teachers prefer. If you have to do these (because you misjudged height, the preference of your instructor or because you´re in a glider) try to divide the final stage of the landing into two parts.. First try to perform an initial "pre-flare" (well above the ground, a couple of feet) where you just pull up the nose a degree or two to decrease your sinkrate. I find it much easier and safer to start holding off the airplane after that because you don´t have to do it in one move. One single move of the stick can be very tricky, if you don´t time it correctly you´ll either hit the ground harder and possibly with the nose-wheel first or b) pull too hard because the ground is rushing at you and start ballooning.

If possible sit down in the plane on your home runway and have the instructor push down the tail from the outside to the landing attitude. Hard-wire the sight picture into your brain. It´s only accurate on this particular runway in this particular plane, but it might help you getting across that invisible bar of soloing the airplane.

Really good advice.

Never be worried about asking an instructor to demonstrate something you are having issues with.

Some instructors try and talk a student through something they are struggling with for way too long - they feel they are robbing the student of stick time by taking control and demonstrating, when in fact, a good clear demonstration (or two), particularly when the student is just not getting it, can often save hours of frustration, money and wasted effort (and avoid the student reinforcing incorrect technique by repetition).

My advice to new instructors (which was passed to me when I was new) was never underestimate the value of a good demonstration.

my 2c

I just want to add my 2c here too. I am not an instructor, but I want to add a comment about people here saying you cannot learn to land by reading. Well, in my case I found the key that made the whole landing thing click in my head by reading the section on how to land in Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langewiesche. His written explanation about mindset and sight pictures made sense to me where half a dozen flying instructors of varying degrees of experience had failed to get the point across.
My point is, I do not think it is wrong to seek knowledge in unorthodox places as you might just find what you need.

This comment has warning signs all over it.

I was an Instructor for many years with a few thousands hours ab-initio training, which is all the early stuff. Chopping and changing instructors is not good for the student in any way, this could work possibly in the military where they have extreme standardisation and clear progress guidelines and expectations. In civilian training you need to have at least one dedicated instructor who you trust and get along with, they can be senior or junior, it's about whether you gel with them. If they are junior it would be good to have them overseen by a competent senior instructor who flies with you occasionally to assess progress, impart knowledge and help mentor the junior. Unfortunately, not many schools practice these training mentalities.

In your case where you are obviously struggling with some concept the school should have seen your hours by now and come up with some sort of plan involving flying with a senior instructor with more tricks in their bag to deploy in your training.

My biggest advice is not to over complicate the landing, thinking about it too much will lead to fixation and mental gymnastics when you just have to perform a relatively simple exercise.

1st Get the approach right 90% of the landing is arriving in a consistent position to start with. Arrive over the threshold at the right attitude, speed and alignment, trim is essential.

2nd Transition your eyesight slowly down the runway to where you would normally look say when driving at high speed on a freeway and smoothly reduce power. From this position you will be able to see the runway alignment and assess the aircraft sinking onto the runway with peripheral vision.

3rd As the aircraft wants to sink raise the nose until it reaches landing attitude, then let it sink onto the runway, use rudder (yaw) to keep the aircraft pointed down the runway and counter any drift sideways with aileron (roll).

(4th after landing) Keep flying using rudder to stay straight, avoid wheel-barrowing by maintaining some backwards force above neutral and aileron into wind, apply brakes if needed, until you are back to taxi speed. Taxi in, shut down, tie down, now landing is complete.

If any of this gets out of control or feels wrong, hit the power, set climb attitude and go around.

I would suggest if the CFI is still following this mantra that 'many' is better after a chat that you seriously look for a change in flying school.

PS, don't let instructors take you flying in poor conditions when you are obviously struggling with something, turbulence, crosswind and wind-shear just complicate the training objective. I used to get pre solo students to come in first thing in the morning with calm winds and atmosphere, then you could just focus on the essentials. Plus the traffic pattern was generally emptier.

Getting the Flare right is all about knowing where to look.

I found this video to be highly useful;

One thing I did many years ago when I was learning to land : I was finding that doing touch and goes was not helpful because I was not able to digest the landing before I had to start concentrating on throttling up, right rudder, raising flaps etc. I asked my instructor to handle the takeoff for a few circuits and all of a sudden I could concentrate on the landing without having to think further ahead to the takeoff. It helped enormously and we only needed to do this for maybe 4 or 5.circuits.

Hi FlyingHeels!

You sound really despondent… but don’t be!

You’re 99% of the way there, only 1% to go. Everyone learns at different rates. Some of the best ab-initio students don’t always make good PPL and CPL holders.

Firstly, you need to talk to your CFI. That’s what they’re there for, that’s why they hold that delegation. If they’re helpful and put a plan in place, you’ll be back on track in no time. If they seem disinterested in your concerns… change schools immediately. A good CFI will probably want to do your next lesson them self!

I have several thousand ab initio instructing hours, was an instructor of instructors and have worked in check and training extensively for airlines. I was much slower than most of my colleagues to first solo. It doesn’t matter.

The first thing you need to get your head around, is that you don’t land a light aircraft. You need to change your thinking on this. What you do, is put it in the right spot, give it all the tools it needs to land (correct configuration, power back to idle) and then when it’s ready, it will land itself. This might sound dumb - but I’ve done remedial training with hundreds of cadet pilots with landing issues where this change in mindset has made the difference. MAKING the aircraft land is not your job.

Where you look is imperative. All the way down final, you should be looking frequently from airspeed inside to the aiming point. Not “the start of the runway” or “near the numbers” … I’m talking an exact aiming point, for example “the very start of the first centreline marking” or exactly halfway between the top and bottom of the runway numbers. Hold this aiming point, and don’t let it move. Don’t undershoot it, don’t let it disappear under the nose. Fly the aircraft to that point, with the mindset of “if I don’t flare, the crater on impact will be at exactly at my elected aim point”.

Make small changes. Tiny, very frequent changes make a much better approach. And then just wait and keep that aiming point from moving.

When you have passed the start of the runway and are now approaching your exact aiming point, and it looks like you’re going to lose sight of it under the cowling of the nose, look up. Look at the threshold of the runway at the other end and then gently round out and try to fly level. As you do so, reduce the power slowly to idle. Don’t slam it back, that creates a pitch change. Make sure you can feel it back on the idle stop, and then just wait. You’re ready to land, but the aircraft may not be. It might be a few knots fast. There might be a small increase in headwind. You might be a bit lighter than the approach speed which is designed for MTOW. None of this is your problem. Your job is not to force the aircraft to land.

Your job is just to fly level, as the aircraft runs out of energy and starts to sink (which you can only see if you’re looking at the far end), then just use gentle back pressure to check the sink rate.

And then finally, and only when the aircraft is ready, it will land itself. Once it touches down, don’t let go of everything. Just keep being gentle and make small, smooth adjustments and then start using the brakes.

Right speed, right place, eyes at the end - and WAIT.

All the best with it! You’re doing great :ok:

I had a student in a worse situation that you are: 45 hours ( all the hours bought in the course ), no solo and no prospects of doing it. Changed to where I was working and first thing the student told me was: I will never fly alone because I have been told so and I really dont want to fly alone after all this. Course on the new airplane ( yes, even changed the airplane in our school), exam and all passed no problem. First day of flying, landed without help, 2 weeks later ~7 hours as I promised after the 2nd flight was having the first solo on a whole new airplane as the other one was low wing and other model.

Sometimes it is really not your problem but the guy/girl who is in the right. Bad attitude, no feedback, no help, not focusing on the errors, etc... I hope you're doing well.

100% this.

Don't fight the plane to the surface, allow it to run out of energy, and just stall, inches above the surface, and it will land itself. When it does, keep doing what you were doing to ride through that nice landing, until you slow to turn off the runway. If you hear the peep of the stall warning horn as you touch the surface, that's fine too! For taildragger planes, it could be a little different, based upon desired technique, but that's a separate discussion....

Change schools. You should not be having a different instructors every time.

I thouroughly agree. You should have consistency of instruction so that your instructor gets to know your weaknesses and finesses your flying skills. It's entirely acceptable to swap instructors if the one you're with isn't the right fit - some sort of personality clash, etc, but it's important to have a good instructor who can remind you of what you did right/ wrong last time and encourage change. Doing your PPL isn't just about Exercise Bashing and then doing your skills test. It's about finessing your flying and for that you need consistency of instruction.

As deja vu remarks - time to change schools for definite.

Saintsman gives you probably the best advice. Continuity is very important. I was taught to fly in a small group of ab initios by three instructors only - most of the time early on, with the same one. This was at a gliding club which only operated at weekends, so turning up every weekend was vital. I learned to fly a glider in six weeks with 32 flights total. Towards the end of the training the other instructors also flew with me and I knew then that I was being checked for potential solo. When I became an instructor myself somewhat later, I always tried to make sure my pupils flew mostly with me as far as possible. I observed that those pupils who went and had a weeks flying at a club which operated all week came back with a considerable improvement in their performance. I appreciate that during this Covid outbreak it has not been possible to work this way, but until you can fly regularly, learning will be a longer process than perhaps you would like. I would not worry too much about the high hours you have.We once had to teach a retired bank manager, who was in his 60's, to fly, but we managed it though he had three times much time in his log book, before the first entry as P1, than any other pupil. Do not give up - a lot of the advice on here has been very good. The video is worth watching. When the day comes, as it will, when your instructor gets out and does not get back in again, you too will be pilot. Best of luck.

"Don´t be afraid of letting the instructor do the landing on your money, it´s well spent."
It depends on how the student's brain works. Some of us learn nothing from watching an instructor do the landing. Kinaethetic imagery was the psychology term 60 years ago.

I don't instruct on the internet but I feel one point needs to be made. The flare does not have to be made at idle power unless you have a very short runway. Carrying 50 -100 rpm over idle power can make the flare last longer and be easier to control. As you get the feel of it go to idle thrust in the flare but be prepared to add a little power if your peripheral vision tells you flared too high and the sink rate is increasing. Pull the power to idle after you touch down.

As has been said earlier, you goal is to keep the airplane flying as long as it will fly, not to stick it on the ground. When starting with a new tail dragger student I wanted to see them fly most of the way down the runway a foot off the ground with perfect runway alignment before they tried their first landing.

You have to be very careful with this statement with regard to modern trainers. Most instructors should really be teaching 'landing attitude' now, flying level until the plane no longer wants to fly means your risk tail strike in many modern trainers. The objective should be to arrest sink close to the ground until landing attitude is reached and then let it settle onto the ground. I even watched an instructor rip the tail skid out of a Grob landing with too high nose attitude. The old wait until you hear the stall warning 'peep' or it doesn't want to fly anymore works with a PA-28 or Cessna 172 or 152 but then you will get into trouble when you fly something else, especially bigger. Landing attitude in most planes is about the same as a cruising climb attitude (roughly) you just need that nose wheel slightly clear of the ground, it does not need to be soaring in the air, this both restricts forward visibility and makes it uncomfortable for passengers later as well as risking tail strike and heavy landings.

For grins I dug out my log book. I flew with 10 different instructors over 9-10 months just on 20 hours to first solo and not much different all the way to PPL. Partly the mad house that was Sherburn in its 90s heyday especially the weekends, partly I wanted to fly on Saturday afternoons and maybe a midweek evening or two in the summer so you took who there was when the weather was good (good looking women's experience may have differed). I doubt many of them spent much time updating student notes afterwards, much less reading them beforehand as they constantly chased the schedule.

I can't see it did much harm to have a broader outlook and find my own way to some extent - some I got on with better than others obviously, but I would happily fly with any of them again. I have / had before I gave up, 500 hours on two vastly different continents and multiple types but those days of training I enjoyed as much as anything I did later. That is the way to look at it.

When I started Instructing average solo time was 5-10 hours, at a busy controlled airport. If a student got to 15 hours and was still not solo it was referred to the Chief Flying Instructor (CFI), generally you (the instructor) would already be speaking to the CFI prior to that if they were going past 10 hours and not looking like going solo soon. If someone got to 20 hours without solo it was extremely rare.

That being said, when I taught at a busy college, with a different syllabus of training the average solo time was 10-15 hours, this was partly because the aircraft used were a bit more twitchy and took a little longer for a new pilot to get used to, big school mentality had a little to do with it as well.

The point of paying for flying instruction is so that you are guided through your training, and not finding your own way. I would take time to find a school/club where you feel welcome and your instructor has time for you, after all you are spending A LOT of money in this area. Now to be clear this does not mean leave because you don't like what your instructor is saying, as the advice may be valid, but it means your instructor should be providing adequate time to brief and debrief and answer questions.

Also remember, You don't know what you don't know... so self learning especially in the early stages can lead to some flawed assumptions that bite you later.

I suspect it might be worth having a sticky on the subject of "learning to land" or "how many instructors". Both subjects seem to come up on a regular basis, and often combined.

12.5 - 13.5 degrees in my current ride unless the runway has a lot of up slope in which case it's more. However, I take your point that one needs to respect the limitations of the airplane one is flying. Just don't apply those limitations to everything that gets flown later.

Time to solo - 7.3 hours; 6 training sessions; time span 18 days. I was glider rated and current but engine management and the very busy controlled airport were new to me. Would have gone solo quicker but my instructor and I were both on a demanding flight test program. This was 1980 and I doubt many do it that quickly now.