How long does it take..

[mmm..bacon]

..To become 'good'.

Back when I was a kid, my dad always used to say that it took 5 years to get good at something; latterly, Gladwell posited 10,000 hours of practice to master one's craft...

Does that apply to aviation? 10k hours is a lot of time... One could argue that hours is only one way of assessing pilot experience (but then that negates the whole premise of my thread) and the number of cycles is more critical - takeoff and landing being the most dangerous phases of flight...

Thoughts from the shooting gallery?

[scdriver]

I think it depends, hours is generally a good measure of experience, but not necessarily competence. For example, there’s lots of pilots with 750 hours who are extremely good pilots, and there are pilots with 5000 hours who can be downright scary. The other thing with hours, like you mentioned, is they don’t take into account t/o and landings. 1000 hours with each flight being 0.5 is a lot better for the hands and feet than each flight being 1.5.

Broadly speaking, I’d say you can be “good” in terms of hands and feet and having a good head on your shoulders by 500-750 hours, but the experience of seeing different situations isn’t there. Being good including the experience should be a couple thousand hours at least. I also think it depends what kind of flying. Driving a 172 around on traffic patrols…not much time to be good. Sticking a twin otter on an iceberg…a lot more time