That is the thrust of the concerns I am addressing about lower required experience.
You seem to believe that private pilots take their checkrides at 40 hours and sport pilots take their checkrides at 20 hours.
The minimum *required* experience is the minimum for a reason. Every person is different and learns differently and frankly, starts from a different position. When teaching someone how to use the satellite communications devices we had in the trucks, it made a huge difference whether they were someone who was a real tech-head or someone who had pushed a broom all their life and "never really messed with those computer things." Likewise, someone who walks in the door not knowing what a vertical stabilizer or an elevator is, is going to take many more hours to get to the required standards than someone who grew up around airplanes.
You can't possibly train a new pilot to be able to handle every situation they're going to come across on their own, no matter how many hours you make them fly. That is borne out by the new revelation that the accident airplane in the case of the OP was being flown by a *commercial* pilot. If a 250+ hour pilot with several checkrides under his belt can still crash a light sport airplane, then clearly more than 250 hours of training should be required to fly a light sport airplane, by your logic.
That simply would not work. If it required 250 hours of training, recreational aviation and most GA as we know it would cease to exist. Even the low amount of training required now keeps the vast majority of the population out.
The key is baby steps. The first one is our first solo. The next is our pilot certificate, be it sport or private. I think that the pilot certificate should be viewed as the second level of solo: When you first soloed, you were allowed to manipulate the controls without a CFI watching over you in the cockpit. This "second solo" that we get when we earn a pilot certificate simply allows us to manipulate the *decisions* without a CFI watching over us, as well as carry passengers.
Where we go from there is up to us. Like Lance pointed out, some will be boring holes in the sky on sunny days. Some will be doing aerobatics. Some will be looking to fly as a means of travel and will probably move on to their instrument ratings. Most of the additional training that needs to happen for those various pursuits is completely different for each of them, and extending the training regimen from where it is will unfairly try to put all of those types of pilots into the same box.
If you want my honest opinion, I think we should increase the PPL time requirements by a number of hours. It's not just a bias against sport pilots, it's a genuine concern that has grown out of the fact that we lose a lot of good people in the first couple of hundred hours they are flying. More training is never a bad thing.
What do you propose? How many hours is "enough"?
More training isn't a bad thing, but WHAT that "more training" consists of is the key. Sport and Private pilots are trained to know just the information that every pilot needs to know. It's the "core courses" so to speak. There are many different directions that "more training" could take.
The real problem is those who think they are done once the ticket is in hand. As I've said many times - Only push the envelope one corner at a time, but you MUST push the envelope to become a better pilot.
Also, compare the fatal (%) vs. non-fatal (%) vs. non-injury (%) crash rates of Bonanzas and common sport aircraft and tell me if the added speed and complexity of a Bonanza is not offset by the redundancy and increased integrity that in most cases accompanies the increase in weight.
Aren't you the guy who's looking through this already? Don't you have those numbers? I'd love to see them.
At some point, though, you have to push them out of the nest and let them learn on their own. The reason for the bump in accident rates in the first few hundred hours is that the new pilot hasn't yet had the bad experiences to form good judgment. The problem is that you can't teach those experiences and have them stick. Learning just doesn't work that way.
A-freakin'-men, Jay.
I saw the same things when training truck drivers. The first week or so, every time we got to a loading dock I'd be reminding them to open their doors, get out and look, etc. But, as time went on, I would stop reminding them of such things. No matter how many times I reminded them, after I stopped sooner or later they'd back into a dock with their doors closed. The embarrassment of having the forklift driver look at them like "You freakin' idiot, how do you expect me to unload you with your doors closed?" and the added time spent in having to pull off the dock, open the doors, and then back in again always made the lesson stick WAY better than reminding them a hundred times would.
Funnier yet, a friend of mine always told his trainees on day one that he'd be doing that to them. One of his trainees said "That's so ****in' stupid! I'm never gonna do that!" Well, later on, he did exactly that, twice in the same day.
That's also why I spent the final week of training mostly silent, letting them screw up as long as it wouldn't put us or anyone else at too severe of a risk (and if that did happen, I reset the clock on their last week as they clearly weren't quite ready enough yet). That allowed me to evaluate how well I'd trained them and evaluate their decisionmaking processes and judgement. It also let them gain the confidence of getting out of a couple of jams without my assistance.
Where did I learn all this from? Pilot training - Observing what my CFI's did for me. And somehow, some way, I managed to get all that in a mere 42.6 hours for my private. Clearly, we need to raise the number of required hours.
Holy crap, that was a long post.
