Thinking Outside The Box

Sunday, May 4th, 2025

Here’s the story on how I got a student pilot to do her first solo by first teaching her to ride a motorcycle. This all started around the year 2015 when I was the chief pilot at a busy international flight school at the Montgomery County Airpark. One day a 17 year old girl came in with her father. We’ll call her Karen for this story. She was part of a program for Montgomery County “gifted and talented” students. These students would spend part of their school day at a local business, sort of like a career day except these students were actually working and being paid. Karen wanted to be a fighter pilot.

Karen was working at the flight school for about 6 months before she came to me and asked if she could start flight training and working on her private pilot certificate. My reply was sure! Karen proceeded to tell me that she wanted me as her flight instructor. With my position as the chief pilot and the other responsibilities that I had, I discussed this with the owner of the flight school and he gave me the approval to dedicate some of my time with Karen as her flight instructor.

At the time that I had started with Karen, I had about 6,000 hours as a flight instructor and maybe about 8,000 hours total time. I had also won many industry awards for my flying and teaching skills. Needless to say, Karen had a very experienced CFI.

Karen and I worked hard to complete all of the required pre-solo maneuvers and training. She wasn’t exactly a natural pilot, however, she worked very hard and was an excellent student. When the training program brought us to the traffic pattern and pattern operations, we reached a plateau. We stayed at this plateau for a long time, a very long time. As a flight instructor, for most maneuvers, you can give the student a power setting, a pitch attitude, and configuration of the aircraft (PAC) and both of you will know the results. Basically, the maneuver will work out. You can’t always do this (PAC Method) for the landing flare. There is a lot of skill and finesse required for the landing flare. During the many hours we spent in the pattern working on landings, Karen started asking me questions like; At what altitude do I need to start pulling back? How high do I need to pitch up? How long do I need to hold that pitch? What should my power setting be in the flare? From these questions, it was clear that we needed to take a few steps backwards.

Remember, Karen was just 17 years old when she started flying. She had recently got her drivers license. And from the questions above, it was clear that she was not “feeling” the plane. Most pilots and instructors know that these types of questions cannot be answered directly when it comes to the landing flare. It depends on how fast your sink rate is. What your airspeed is? What the winds are doing, etc. This is when I decided to think outside the box and do something very different with Karen. Karen had never driven a manual transmission car or operated a motorcycle or minibike. This is when I decided that it may be best for me to teach Karen how to ride a motorcycle. There is a lot of skill and finesse required to be a good motorcycle rider. So the flying was on hold and our lessons consisted of riding a motorcycle up and down a back taxiway at the airport. The motorcycle was my 2004 Honda Rebel.

I taught her to work the throttle and clutch together to be able to keep the bike upright while at a very slow speed. By the time I finished with her motorcycle lessons, she could turn the bike in a tight circle at very slow speeds without her feet touching the ground, she could shift all of the gears up and down. Plus she could use the gears to slow her speed, and she could come to almost a complete stop with putting her feet on the ground. She basically mastered the motorcycle and could run the bike through it’s paces. Then I put her back in the plane and she soloed on the second lesson back in the plane.