Learn to Fly the Old Way

Ron Machado has a blog post about the Ultimate “Minimalist” Private Pilot Syllabus. That was published in 1971 by the FAA, when the idea was to teach students to fly, not to manage, an airplane.

Back then, there was no such thing as a "pre-solo written exam". If you look through the syllabus, you will see that the pre-solo instruction was all about flying the airplane.

The instructor who taught me to fly was a B-17 pilot in the Second World War. The instructor who gave me a "complex checkout" 20 years later was a L-19 pilot in the 1950s. The instructor who gave me a tailwheel refresher three years before the complex checkout was a former aerobatics competitor. I don't claim to be any great shakes as a pilot. If I can fly at all, it's because those guys taught me not how to manage systems, but how to fly an airplane.