Originally Posted by
CAPILOTON
I always wait until they have at least 25 hours. Regardless if they are ready or not I would not want to have the conversation with the FAA about why they went solo at 10 or 15 hours. You can always do the night landings, short field landing‘s, and soft field landing‘s as well as some airport hopping if you need to build up to 25 hours. These things need to be done shortly after solo so you might as well just do them before to build up more experience and increase the chances of them having a more successful solo.
It sounds like you’re projecting you shortcomings as an instructor onto your students, unfortunately. 25 hours “just because” is absurd.
I’ve had many students that soloed around 10 hours and a few that never did. The rest were somewhere in between. In every case, the soloed when they were ready, but most were well under 20 hours.
To mandate an arbitrary number just says you suck as an instructor and that you place more emphasis on a hypothetical defense against the FAA rather than meeting your students where they learn.
Get a syllabus and really learn how to teach it dude.