Originally Posted by
snippercr
On the other end of the scale, the pilots I dislike are the no-longer private-student pilots but still a student pilot (people with like 50-300 hours). These are the people (not ALL but alot of the ones Ive seen) who think they are "pilots" now and are amazing at what they do (this tends to apply to the younger generation). These are the ones who love sitting around talking about how close they came to breaking a FAR, flying in 2 mile vis on a VFR plan or how they irritated a controller. These people seem to think that its cool to come close to or even break a rule. I am not trying to stereo type here - I do fit both those descriptions; 150 hours and 21, but that tends to be the case.
Uh-oh, I think you just described me!
My topics of discussion with my classmates are never what I did right on my last lesson but always what I did wrong. Whenever we start talking about some of the stupid mistakes we've made it really helps with the learning process (in my opinion, anyway). For instance, I don't think it's cool to tell my buddies how I almost dropped the airplane on the runway doing a go-around during pre-private training but I do like to think that they might learn why not to yank the flaps without a positive rate of climb without actually doing it.
I look at my classmates as valuable learning tools, a part of the training equation just like the flight instructor, ground instructor, or pilot examiner. Every pilot learns from experience and the mistakes we make in the air are the lessons that ring the loudest (especially while solo). We can learn a lot from each other as long as we all swallow our pride, admit we made a mistake, learn from it, and for Pete's sake don't glorify it!
I really hope that mentality doesn't make me one of the pilots that people hate!