JohnBurke

You're off to a good start. You're what, a private pilot, and already know more than the rest of the industry?

The concept is that of pilot in command. You are responsible for you. The buck stops with you. There is no magic osmosis machine that injects pilot judgment, pilot skills, or pilot abilities or pilot knowledge into you. You are expected to do this, and it will be this way whether you're studying for your private pilot certificate, or completing a type rating for a transport category four engine turbojet aircraft.

Yes, if you fail a checkride, you will never be able to say "I had a bad instructor," or "my school was lacking." To say that in a job interview will only be viewed as a negative assessment of you, and it has nothing to do with whether you passed a checkride as a student pilot. It has everything to do with your ability to be honest, to be humble and to accept responsibility for your own actions, your own career, your own study, and yes, your own failures. Yes, in this industry, you own your failures, and yes, they stay with you forever. There need be no greater incentive to study your ass off, need there?

Not getting what you need from watching a video? Then go buy a book. Buy five. Highlight them until you run out of highlighters, then go buy, more. Write in the margins. Make flash cards. Put up cockpit posters. Buy a model airplane and hand-fly it in traffic patterns around your room while reciting your memory items. Learn to do estimates and mental math without the gizmos, because the gizmos will fail. You're to be a pilot, not a video game player. Put on the big boy or big girl pants. No more games. There is no law, regulation, requirement, restriction, or rule of thumb which says that you can't set higher goals for yourself, or study more material, or study longer, or try harder. The only person who limits that is you.

In the cockpit there is no higher authority than the pilot in command, because his or her decisions are final. Air traffic control does not command your cockpit. If ATC makes a mistake, they go home at the end of the day. You may not. Your instructor is not taking your checkride. You are. When you are pilot in command, you are signing for the airplane, and taking ultimate responsibility for the outcome of the flight. You are expected to take the same level of responsibility for the outcome of your career.

There must be a change in the mind which sees responsibility for his success lying anywhere but in himself. If you fail a checkride, you fail a checkride. Own it. Admit it. Learn from it. Don't do that again.

That attitude is a guaranteed failure, looking forward to a career. You need an attitude adjustment, and you have a lot to learn.

If you don't like your instructor, or if you don't think your instruction is adequate, then seek a different instructor. Who is paying the bill?

YOU are responsible for you. Embrace that concept. It will be essential for your entire career, and anything less will not be tolerated.

Which part of this industry is "incredibly easy?"

This is patently false. A student should fail a checkride if the student cannot perform to the standards expected for that certificate or rating. That's why standards are given. Equally true, the student should fail if the student has not prepared, does not know his or her material, and does not exercise proper judgement and decision making. Know yourself, know your aircraft, know your weather, know your systems, your options, your limitations. There is never an excuse for failure to know those things, but such failures are manifest in a checkride, as they should be.

Instructors are watched, according to their student's success. An instructor with a low student pass rate is placed under surveillance by the FAA, and may be subject to re-examination. The purpose of the gold seal placed on an instructor certificate is directly tied to student pass rate, and though you're new in the industry, the FAA has a long history of taking the competency of instructors seriously. If you question the competency of your instructor, then get a different instructor.

If you feel that a student shouldn't be accountable for his behavior, his preparation, or his studies, or his performance, then it's a lesson you haven't learned. Learn it.

An instructor may be the most competent, savvy, correct, and skilled instructor in all the flying world, yet cannot force a student to learn, and cannot make a student study. If you're not passing, then you can blame the instructor until the contrails dissipate, but it will still be you failing your checkride and any attempt to blame your instructor will only ever reflect badly on you. You are preparing to be a pilot in command who takes responsibility for himself, his flight, his aircraft, his operation, his passengers. As a pilot in command, take responsibility for your success, and your failures. There will never be a time when you'll impress an interviewer by making excuses and blaming others, whether it's a flight school, instructor, examiner, inspector, aircraft, or former employer. Don't ever do that.

On a flight deck with hundreds of people, or hundreds of thousand pounds of freight, we are expected to be a team. That means we show up prepared. That means we take full responsibility for our preparation. That means we know our procedures, we operate in a standardized manner, and that we live up to all of the standards expected of us. It also means that if we haven't done our part, we don't pass the myriad of checkrides that a working professional must undergo, from recommendation rides, stage checks, type rides, FAA observation rides, line checks, proficiency training, recurrent training, upgrade training, and so on. Checkrides become a fact of life as a pilot, whether pilot in command or second in command. In every case, bar none, you will be expected to expend the effort to prepare and meet the standards, or you'll fail. There will never come a time when you will be permitted to blame another for that failure: you're expected to be responsible for yourself. As a member of a team on the flight deck, we trust one another. It's hard to trust one who makes excuses for lack of preparedness. In fact, it sews distrust.

You cannot be responsible for anyone else, be it one other, or several hundred, until you accept full responsibility for yourself. That's how it works.

At the end of the day, the mechanic goes home. The dispatcher goes home. The examiner goes home. The chief pilot goes home. Crew schedulers, flight followers, briefers, linemen, and everyone else goes home. If you don't do your job, you look suspiciously like a smoking hole in the ground, as do your passengers, cargo, and fellow employees. Abdicating responsibility to others, and putting off our failures to prepare on anyone else, is to embrace that smoking hole.

That smoking hole is not your friend, only insofar as it may motivate you to stay far, far away.

Welcome to aviation.