by Rusty Allman

Aviation attorney John C. “Rusty” Allman is a former Top Gun pilot and commanding officer of the U.S. Navy’s largest jet training squadron in Pensacola, Fla. He has also flown as a commercial airline captain. Allman has over 10,000 flight hours and is type-rated on a wide variety of commercial and general aviation aircraft.



Remember this as you train to become a pilot or serve as a flight instructor. “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old and bold pilots.”

Flying must be learned by doing. As a result, pilot training is inherently dangerous. The flight instructor’s job is to prevent that inherent danger from becoming a disaster.

Flight instruction is one part demonstration and three parts coaching, with hands and feet poised a few millimeters from the controls, ready to avert a mishap.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, more flight-training accidents occur with experienced students and seasoned instructors, usually in critical phases such as take-offs or landings. The reason boils down to that number-one killer of pilots and passengers: complacency.

I saw this first-hand as commanding officer of the U.S. Navy’s largest jet training squadron in Florida, from October 1982 to December 1983. Once a student pilot reaches solo-flight stage, he or she needs practice to reach an acceptable level for licensing. This is when the flight instructor’s job becomes the most critical. In order for the student to gain confidence, the instructor must pay close attention but not hover.

As confidence grows, new pilots will push the envelope, exploring the full capacity of their skills and the capabilities of their aircraft. In this stage, the alert instructor will catch boundary excursions and pull the student and aircraft back into a safe flight envelope. However, the complacent instructor may miss such a situation. That’s when you read about a flight training accident.

Most accidents caused by pilots occur in the first 500 to 700 hours of flight experience. From 700 to 1,500 hours, there are very few pilot-caused accidents. This is the time when pilots are more cautious than confident. Between 1,500 and 2,500 flight hours, the accident rate rises dramatically as pilots become overconfident in their abilities and their aircraft.

Accidents caused by flight-instructor inattention demonstrate the same predictability. During the first 500 hours of instructor flight time, new instructors do not have the ability to think and react ahead of the aircraft and students. After 500 hours, flight instructors are more able to anticipate situations and predict student errors. At this stage, flight instructors can concentrate on guiding students to top performance.

Later, after flying with dozens of students who make the same mistakes, flight-instructor complacency rears its ugly head. An instructor in this stage may let a student get way over his or her head in the mistaken belief that the instructor can salvage any problem.

Luckily, once flight instructors have a few thousand hours (and a few scares) under their belts, they realize the dangers of the “complacency” phenomenon and become much more cautious.