How to become a US pilot in 2 months on a budget

1 coffee down. Early Friday morning I met who was to be my FAA Designated Pilot Examiner, Sherry Diamond at a small office in a flight school at KPAO (Palo Alto, CA) airport. It was the morning of my FAA checkride. If I pass this, I will walk out with a US pilot license usable virtually anywhere in the world. I didn't think I'd be nervous like the others, I'm not the nervous type, and I felt ready. But I was a bit nervous. The check ride involves a deep, 2 hour verbal exam, and a multi-hour flight exam where the examiner does fun things like suddenly shut off your engine - you must land the plane safely on a runway (with no engine) or you fail. It's a simulated engine failure landing.

Sherry carefully examined my logbook. She looked puzzled. After a few minutes, she looked up and asked where the rest of my logbook is. I told her she's looking at it, and asked her what the problem was. She said the problem was it begins in December, and February has barely started. Checkride in just 2 months? She said nobody does it this fast. Takes 6 months minimum, often years. I did it in 2, and with a full time job.

I did not get my license on that day - we had to postpone the flight portion of the check ride until the following Monday due to bad weather. I did get my license on Monday. Since then, I've flown my plane between New York and San Francisco 2 times, and am flying it to the Bahamas soon.

A lot of people have asked me how I did it so fast. I'm going to tell you. The two most important ingredients:

1. A phenomenal CFI (certified flight instructor)
2. Ability to fly at least a few times a week until you're finished.

Handshake after my first solo flight at KPAO
with my instructor Howard Foster (left).

How to find a CFI 

Find a CFI who has graduated 50+ students from first flight to private pilot. Ask how many of them have died flying. The number should be at or close to 0. My instructor Howard has graduated over 300 students. If you follow this simple rule you will do very well. You don't need to interview 10 instructors and find one you're best friends with. Avoid having friends or brand new CFI's teach you, even if they're free. This is your money, your time, your license, not theirs. Avoid multiple instructors. Avoid siwtching instructors halfway through.

Fly at least 3 times a week

First cross-US flight. Well below freezing outside at this altitude.

Most people take 60-100 hours of flying to get their license. You're no exception. You have 3 options.

1. Go to a premium flight school. At $130/hr to rent a plane from a flight school, and $80/hr for an instructor, you need serious money. But there is another way.  Reality is, you don't actually need a flight school. Every CFI working with a flight school is also an independent CFI. He'll charge you less hourly rate if you avoid the flight school. You can ask flight schools for CFI recommendations even if you don't intend on using that flight school directly. Aviation folks are very helpful and friendly.
2. You can buy 'block hours' in someone's plane. Find a pilot who doesn't fly much, offer them $115/hr and buy 50 hours in a block. It's cheaper, likely a better plane (not trashed by other students), and you won't have to reserve it. It will almost always be available. 
3. Buy your own plane. This is what I did, off ebay no less. You can buy a 1970s Cessna 172 for < $30,000. A 172 burns about 8 gallons of fuel per hour ($50-$60/hr), so at that point you're just paying fuel costs and the more you fly the less your hourly operating expense is. You'll fly a lot. And it's awesome owning your own plane. You can sell the plane when you're done with it and recover virtually all the initial cost (old planes don't depreciate much). I ended up keeping my plane (pictured above) and I fly it all the time. I'm upgrading to a Mooney M20TN soon.

My first time flying left-seat in a 414 multi!

Do your own ground school

Since you opted for not joining a flight school, you won't be required to do ground school through them. You're smart, just do it on your own time.

1. Get the King Schools Private Pilot DVDs. Copy it to your laptop/IPAD/IPhone and watch it back to back. I watched it in VLC Player at 1.65x speed.
2. Next, read one of the private pilot books. I used this Complete Private Pilot Book, but there are others.
3. Start doing practice questions at www.exams4pilots.org. You won't be scoring 100% yet but it's a good time to start practicing.
4. Read the FAA Pilot's Handbook of aeronotical knowledge and the Airplane Flying Handbook. This is a good review of steps 1 and 2, and will fill in holes missed by 1 & 2.
5. Re-watch the King DVDs from (1).  You'll be amazed as everything will now make sense.
6. You should now be scoring in the 90% range in www.exams4pilots.org. 
7. Take your written exam. It's surprisingly easy. I finished mine in under an hour, I believe I had 2 hours remaining. I got an A.

I was studying all the time. Before work, on the bus to work, and on the way home. When I wasn't flying or working, I was studying. I had no social life for 2 months. My new girlfriend was my studying time and my airplane. There's a lot of material to cover. There's no shortcut.

To simulator or not simulator

Flying over manhattan - skyline hudson route.

I love simulators. I think they're tremendous for learning IFR flying. But, my personal opinion is that you should not learn VFR flying in a simulator.  You won't have time anyway - if you're flying 3x a week and doing your own ground school, you'll be very busy.

There are many great online discussions about why simulators aren't great for learning how to fly VFR, read them, I won't rehash. One thing I"ll mention is that even for pattern practice they don't really work. You can't look out the window left and see the runway when flying downwind. You can't even see it when you're on base so your turn to final in a simulator will be off. Save simulators for IFR training, it's very applicable there. I strongly endorse X-Plane.  I love this product. I bought a radio stack, yoke, rudders, throttle box and run x-plane on my macbook pro at home.  I fly x-plane with ForeFlight (it integrates perfectly).

IPads and Flying

I believe modern technology makes safer, better pilots. I fly with an IPad and ForeFlight. It's amazing. I tried all the pilot apps and prefer ForeFlight hands down. I flew with Garmin Pilot, WingX and others. I don't use paper charts at all. I scan everything that would be on paper, turn it into a PDF and put it into foreflight (has a handy 'Documents' tab). Even my 1970 Cessna 172 POH is now in PDF form. I keep paper backups but never use them. I now also fly with Xavion.

Day trip to the Hamptons.

Tip on how to land a 172K

In my early days of flying I had troubles landing. I even feared that maybe, I wasn't good enough to do this. But it looked so easy when they did it. I spent hours reading articles, watching vidcos, Suddenly, I 'figured it out' and I could land without issues. I can now land a 172 in 15-20kts cross wind gusting to 25kts with 4 people, at max gross capacity. There is one specific Eureka moment I remember which helped me land.

The flare. They keep saying: at 10' above the runway, you must flare the plane. Forget this word and this concept when you're actually landing a plane. It made me think of an eagle landing, abruptly spreading out his wings to slow down his descent. You don't do this in a plane.  All you're doing is gently leveling. You're on short final, crossing the displaced threshold of the runway, descending at about 500' per minute. About 10' above the runway (don't worry if you can't judge 10 feet), just level the plane. Gently pull back on the yoke until the plane is flying level - no longer descending. I wouldn't call this a flare, I'd call it leveling off. This is pretty easy, isn't it? Once you're level, just keep it level. The plane will continue slowing down, and slowly continue sinking towards the ground. As it slows down you'll have to keep applying more and more elevator back pressure to keep it from sinking too fast, this will be natural. Before you know it, butter smooth landing, you'll barely feel the wheels touch the ground.

My very first landing as a private pilot (mom in back seat).

En route to Lake Tahoe for some February snowboarding.

One exercise I do recommend is not actually landing at first - just fly the plane level about 10' above the runway. Do a go around. Do it again. Get comfortable flying close to the ground. It's like a car! Very easy. On your 3rd or 4th 'flyover', just reduce power. It will land itself. You'll think someone else was flying. It was all you.

How fast did I get my license?

Here are my actual stats.

First solo: January 16th, 106 landings, 20.6 hours total (all dual, by nature).

Check ride: February 10th: 187 landings, 54 hours, 27.6 dual, 26.4 PIC.

I preferred flying solo as soon as I was able to, I only went dual when I wanted to work on something specific.

About me

My other beloved hobby is technology. It's now more than a hobby - I get paid for it! I'm a software engineer at Google. I used to make video games for Xbox360 and PlayStation3. I also kiteboard, sail boats, race motorcycles, play a few musical instruments, have dabbled in movie production, surf, scuba dive, and the list goes on and on. These are all great things, but above all, I love flying. It is the most incredible thing I've ever done in my life. I am now working on my commercial license, and I plan on learning how to fly gliders, tailwheels, jets, acrobatic planes and helis. This is just the beginning.

I want dedicate this article first and foremost to my friend Keith Siilats who inspired me to fly and was one of the two instructors that got me to my private pilot license; Howard Foster who was my primary instructor, an amazing pilot, teacher, and friend; to my mom and dad for enduring this journey and being my first passengers (SF, Golden Gate, Napa Valley, Yosemite); to my mechanic Danny out of KLVK for being the most awesome and honest mechanic and great friend; to Sherry Diamond for being a phenomenal FAA examiner; to Tyler Peterson who was the best copilot anyone could ask for in a 4 day San Francisco-NYC flight; Austin Meyers thank you for creating the amazing X-Plane sim and disrupting the aviation industry with new technologies, and last but not least to Craig MacCallum, who died doing what he loved most.