The first solo is usually a confidence builder for the learner.
No professional CFI is going to endorse you for solo flight unless you’ve done all 15 of the items listed under cFAR 61.87, and you can consistently perform them to a safe standard as outlined in the syllabus and/or the published Airman Certificate Standards.
That being said, post-solo there may be some times when you as a student pilot question your abilities—everyone can have a bad day in the cockpit.
A particular learner I had endorsed for solo flight was, in my professional opinion, a very good pilot who had one of those bad days. He designed video games for a living and was particularly fond of those that involved aviation. After each flight lesson he went home and “flew” what he had learned in the airplane on his computer. It helped him build procedures, especially when he practiced the pattern.
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The actual flying lessons helped him with the game as well. In the virtual world the engine of his airplane kept quitting as he taxied from the hangar to the runway. He wasn’t sure why. He had been playing the game since before he started flying lessons. On his first lesson in the real world he learned about leaning for taxi, and that took care of the virtual problem.
One day when he met me for a dual lesson, he told me he was feeling a little skittish because his second solo flight had not gone as planned. He had flown early in the morning, and he was concerned he had done something wrong during the flight.
It began when he went to the practice area to practice maneuvers. After clearing turns, he self-announced location and intention as he had been taught then initiated the maneuver. They went well, he said, but he didn’t hear anyone else on frequency. It was a VFR morning, and a Saturday to boot, so there should be other aircraft out there—shouldn’t there? We verified he had been on the correct frequency and tested the aircraft radio using a hand-held. The radio was fine. He had launched at 0800. I suggested perhaps folks were sleeping in.
The other challenge he had was when he entered the pattern for landing. He was getting bounced all over and wondered if he had forgotten how to fly. I proposed it was because he was alone in the airplane, ergo the aircraft was lighter and more susceptible to displacement by thermals.
By the time he returned for the pattern the sun was starting to heat up the ground, creating those bumps. Also, the windsock showed it coming from the southwest, so perhaps the mechanical turbulence created by the winds flowing over the hillside and factory buildings near the airport were to blame.
We took off with me in observer mode. It was bumpier than he had experienced before, and he was tensing up on the controls. The application of maneuvering speed helped smooth out the ride, and he learned there are sometimes when Mother Nature will bat you around like a cat toy. You just have to expect it.
We discussed what areas in the ground would create the bumps as we flew over them and noted that flying under a cloud often created a bump. Knowing what caused the bumps and how to mitigate them was a game changer. His confidence improved after that, and it wasn’t long before he was sending me selfies taken on the ramp at his destination airport during his solo cross-country flights.
Sometimes a change of instructor can greatly impact a learner’s confidence. If the learner needs real-time feedback, and the CFI is always quiet in the cockpit providing very little instruction, the lack of communication can undermine the learner, as they don’t know if they are doing things correctly, and that creates self-doubt. A flight with a CFI who encourages the learner to talk through the maneuvers as if teaching them to the CFI and then praises correct procedures and offers correction for improvement can do wonders for the learner’s confidence.
It is important to ask the learner if they want real-time feedback or a memory dump at the end of the lesson. If it is the latter, the CFI should be taking notes in the cockpit. Either way it is important for the lesson to begin with a pre-brief outlining what tasks will be learned and end with a debrief where the CFI lets the learner know what they did well, what could use some improvement, how this improvement will be achieved, and what to expect on the next lesson.
To the learners: If the CFI is resistant to this level of information exchange, and you want it or need it, they are not the right instructor for you.
Few things destroy a learner’s confidence quicker than a CFI who is unprepared or uninterested in the lesson. If there is no pre-lesson briefing, no emphasis on obtaining and analyzing a weather briefing , no checklist use, and no application of a syllabus, it is quite possible that learning is not taking place and the learner is just being taken for a ride—in every sense of the word.
To the learners: You’re paying good money for those flying lessons, and the aforementioned items, so the briefings, checklist, and syllabus should be part of the package.
When a CFI is lax about briefings, checklist use, and clearing turns, the learner will almost certainly have a crisis of confidence if and when they fly with a different instructor or a DPE.
If there has been an event that has put a dent in the learner’s confidence, a good CFI will sit down with them to deconstruct the situation and create a means of restoring their confidence. This can mean breaking down tasks into base components.
For example, if the learner gets behind the airplane while doing a ground speed check during a cross-country flight, practice on the ground with CFI-generated numbers: “Your ground speed is 87 knots. How long will it take to travel 17 nm between checkpoint A and checkpoint B?” Then take this practice into the air.
If there is an issue in the pattern, take the learner up to a stall-safe altitude and fly a faux pattern, focusing on speed, bank angle, aircraft configuration, and control.
If there is a particular maneuver the learner is struggling to perform, the CFI needs to be wary of overtraining. Should the learner become frustrated, learning will not take place. It sometimes helps for the CFI to demonstrate the maneuver a second or maybe even third time and cautiously coach the learner through it.
Above all the CFI must be sincere in their praise when learning takes place. It is the positive reinforcement that creates pilots.
