When a student hasn’t soloed despite logging plenty of hours, there’s never just one reason. It’s usually an old, familiar story with new characters—this time, a student pilot and a CFI.
Any instructor learns quickly that this relationship deserves real scrutiny. No one can teach you to land an airplane except you—instructors guide the process and keep it safe. Nothing more.
A few things tend to delay a solo, and they rarely show up alone. First: a missing strategy in the pattern—not just knowing the turns, but understanding why you fly them that way. Second: a knowledge gap. An instructor can talk for an hour and still teach nothing. Good instructors give you space to figure it out—to make a mistake and fix it yourself. If they won’t stop talking, that’s a sign they don’t have a strategy. They start simple and build toward complexity, and if you don’t understand what your CFI is telling you, say so. Third, and usually the biggest: Are the lessons actually productive? Are you closer today than you were yesterday?
Before a student solos, an instructor owes them more than a safe landing. A handful of required tasks must be demonstrated first, and each one exists for a reason. Ground reference maneuvers teach tracking over the ground and correcting for wind. Slow flight introduces that the back side of the power curve—the region where adding power/adjusting pitch relate—is what keeps the airplane flying. Minimum controllable airspeed shows the edges of the flight envelope. Stalls teach recovery for when the wing simply stops flying adequately. Recoveries practiced at different airspeeds, configurations, and bank angles round out the picture. Most of a private pilot’s real flight training happens here, in this stage—not after. Remember, a lot of this takes time to learn; a 20-hour solo may not happen right away.
Good instructors hand students a maneuvers guide—a visual reference showing exactly what each maneuver requires. Students remember pictures better than lectures, and it shows.
This is a big reason Part 141 schools—the FAA’s structured, syllabus-based path—tend to outperform the more flexible Part 61 path. They hand out these resources, hold students and instructors to a set standard for each maneuver, and run stage checks, which are periodic evaluations, often by a different instructor, that keep your CFI accountable. Some Part 61 schools do this too, but none are required to. Know what to expect before you choose where you learn—though in my experience, you won’t really know what fits until you’ve lived it.
When an instructor does this well, the training visibly builds toward a student’s ability to solo. Watch for warning signs: no syllabus, no plan, no supervisor you ever meet—or worse, no supervisor at all. If that’s the case, you may be paying to teach your instructor how to instruct, and odds are they have no plan to get you where you’re going. Whatever progress you make is coincidental. Most flight instructors, after all, are building hours toward the minimums for an airline transport pilot certificate. Few CFI certificates get used long-term; most instructors move on once they hit their ATP number. Many experienced instructors end up in a Part 61 environment instead of a flight school—or at a flight club. New student pilots rarely even know flight clubs exist. Finding an experienced instructor takes some effort; an EAA meeting can sometimes help.
Watch for two habits in particular. First, an instructor who won’t stop talking during a maneuver. If you’re never given room to see a mistake, work through it, and fix it yourself, you aren’t learning the process—you’re following a voice. Second, watch for an instructor who’s scared. A nervous instructor has little margin to hand over the controls; they ride the controls instead of letting you fly, and by the end of the lesson you may not even know who landed the airplane. Fly with people who let you fly—and learn.
Biology still matters. Fine motor skills matter for learning to fly, and they decline with age, so older students should expect a longer path to solo. But I’ve never seen a problem with an older learner as long as they feel like they were making progress.
Students also need to study between lessons. Professional athletes spend more time reviewing films than playing the sport; student pilots should do the same. Showing up unprepared can turn an entire lesson into a wasted one—nobody solos by osmosis. If you’re unprepared, that’s not on your instructor, the school, or the weather. You only get where you’re going by putting in the work.
Any instructor can bring structure to a lesson, but sustaining it takes willpower when the school doesn’t run on syllabuses. Culture sets the tone, so don’t be surprised if you’re the only one who cares that you haven’t soloed. One easy tell: Look at how a school treats its airplanes—neglect there usually means neglect everywhere. In the end, you’re the paying customer. Making sure the school gives you the structure you need is your job, not theirs.
I’ve never seen it fail: When a CFI builds the structure—or facilitates the opportunity, as I like to say—and the student does the work behind the scenes, there’s rarely any question about where that student stands on the road to solo.
While conducting the initial introductory walk-around of a Cessna 150 at a part 141 school in the 1970’s, I pointed out the yoke to newly assigned student and mentioned to him that it resembled a car steering wheel but actually served the airplane in a different way. He responded: “I’ve never driven a car so I can’t relate to what you are telling me”. Later as I unfastened the oil dipstick access door to check oil level, he asked me how I knew in which direction to turn the winged dzus fastener.
15 flight hours later when my student had not yet soloed I was called into the chief instructor’s office to explain myself as a CFI. My explanation was that this individual simply did not possess the usual set of aptitudes which we were accustomed to seeing in most students and that he would require extra time. The chief instructor understood what I meant after giving him a stage check. As I remember it took at least 25 hours of dual for him to solo. Money was not an issue and he was among the most pleasant students I ever had the pleasure of instructing.
I’m in favor of letting a student solo just as soon as they can take the airplane around the pattern safely. No need to know and understand the aviation world ahead that awaits them. That first solo tells us that we are now a pilot and really encourages us. Ten to twelve hours used to be about right for a one time initial solo, maybe even eight. And that was with a taildragger.
It disturbs me that today, 20 hours seems normal. When I started training in 1981, I soloed in 7 hours. Anything over 10 hours was considered a problem with either the student or the instructor.
I don’t see the point in rushing a solo. The potential for a catastrophe is very high that early in the game and the FAA and insurance companies both know it’s high risk territory. So much so that students are limited to a 25 mile radius with direct supervision from the instructor. And Yes, I’m told that the Navy has pilots landing jets on an aircraft carrier at 200 hours, but that is an extremely structured and fighter focused program.
I once knew an Air Force F15/16 pilot who breezed through an interview at a popular, well known airline(SWA), only to leave and do it again at a well known freight carrier(UPS), and then he left that too in a short period of time. I asked him why he left and he said he wasn’t comfortable shooting instrument approaches. It has been said that you could teach a monkey to fly if you had enough time and bananas, but it takes considerable time to teach and create both memorized monkey motor skills and the good judgement that comes by example set by the instructor.
So to new students I would say, don’t waste your time and money with an inexperienced or low time instructor if you want to learn aviation well. But don’t assume it is the instructors fault if you can’t solo. Find a gray haired instructor with some serious maturity that will let you make mistakes without grabbing the controls every time you make a mistake. If he is that scared of the airplane, he will never allow you to go far enough to get the feel, the skills and the understanding you need to fly with.
I know CFIs who don’t solo anyone, regardless of aptitude, until at least 20 hours. It is what it is. Students should probably be informed of that upfront.
Some students are a bit timid, even after several hours in the airplane. They don’t feel like they are really in control of the airplane until after they solo, even though they can consistently do successful touch and go landings. So one strategy is to tell the student that he is now the instructor for a few landings and the instructor is now the student. So you tell him you’re gonna do the landing and that you’re gonna mess it up bad, and the student is going to save the landing. He’s going to have to do it for himself sooner or later anyway. As an instructor, don’t do this unless you really can save a trainer from any possible scenario the student could create with incorrect recovery. So acting like a student, you come in too high and too fast, then you approach too low and too slow and ask your student to tell you what you are doing wrong. You can approach the runway way off centerline, or ballon the landing and ask him to save the landing and any number of other scenarios. This is a real confidence builder. And when you get him to where he can save the landing in any scenario, you will also feel comfortable letting him fly around the patch by himself. The point is, get the student to where he doesn’t like the way you are messing up the landings and he wants to take it away from you and fix it.
The number of hours required to solo matters a lot less than the nature of the content learned in those hours. When I learned to fly, most students soloed in about ten hours. None of that time was spent learning the avionics. The most important instrument was the view out the windows.
We learned to judge pitch by the position of the nose with respect to the horizon out front (the REAL horizon.) If the nose crept up higher on the horizon, it usually meant we were going “uphill” and were going to be getting slower. To increase speed, lower the nose (go “downhill”) just like on a bicycle. Sure, we could look at the airspeed indicator, but the sound of the wind and the feel provided a more direct indication than the number on the dial, especially when we got very slow.
Bank angle was level when both wingtips were the same distance above the horizon, in a high wing airplane (or below the horizon in a low wing airplane.) To hold a heading, aim the nose toward a point on the horizon — a barn, or a group of trees on the horizon — and then keep the wings level. Soon we would learn to recognize drift caused by the wind, and learn to build in a wind correction angle.
We also learned that nose-high attitude (going “uphiil”) had its limits — and if carried to an extreme, we’d be going down, fast! The chief flight instructor — he also owned the airport and flight school — wouldn’t let any student solo until they had not only experienced spins but could demonstrate that they could reliably recover from a spin. That was the most effective spin avoidance training: students trained in full stalls, accelerated stalls, and spins were unlikely to stumble into one inadvertantly; they could see it coming and knew what to expect.
All of these fundamentals worked in the runway environment, too. Coasting down final, nose attitude controlled airspeed, and soon one learned to manage the tradeoffs of altitude and airspeed, power, distance, and sink rate to make good landings on a chosen spot on the runway, and we learned how to use bank angle and opposite rudder (slip) to manage the effects of a crosswind.
Later, when I worked as a CFI in busier airspace, the communication and navigation aspects demanded a bit more attention, but I still tried to ensure that each student got the necessary fundamentals of primary training. Most of my students soloed in the ten to twelve hour range.