It took me 80 hours of flying time before I was ready to take and pass my flight test. Most students go into the program looking at the minimum requirements of 25 hours for RPL and 45 hours for PPL and they estimate their budgets based on these minimums. The word that misses most of us is that these are the prescribed "mandatory" minimums. The reality is that it is probably going to take you a good deal longer that this minimum for your licence. Heck, at 80 hours, I had even exceeded the requirements for the PPL!
So what follows in this post are some of the reasons it took so long (for me) and some ideas on how students and instructors can reduce the number of dual flight hours and bring costs down. After all the more money you save, the more flights you can take!
First off, let not the number of hours you take, make you feel inferior (or otherwise) as a pilot. It often has nothing to do with how good a pilot you are going to become. That is more a function of whether you have the attitude and the outlook to stay the course and keep learning, keep improving.
That being said, here are some reasons it took me longer than perhaps it should have, or longer than it took some other students in my flight school. By listing these reasons, I hope the solutions to them will become obvious.
Frequency: I was unable to take lessons at a regular schedule. Often, my work would require travel away from home, with a result that I would sometimes go one to three months between flight lessons. I began at a steady frequency of two flights a week, and then a combination of weather related cancellations, work travel, and other reasons made my schedule sporadic and irregular. This contributed to a number of flights spent in recalling previous exercises and getting back into practice.
Learning style: Perhaps I couldn't change my learning style but I could work with my instructor in a way that suits my learning style. I discovered this quite late in the learning process simply because the first few lessons went by so quickly and easily. Up until the circuit, I didn't really experience any trouble. The circuit was a different story altogether. So many things were being thrown at me at one time that I would often fall behind the aircraft; The pattern, the radio calls, downwind checks, turning base at the right time, configuring the aircraft for normal landing, lining up, airspeed checks, flaring and touch down. I believe I focussed too much on getting the touchdown right (for which you get a mere 10 seconds or so in each circuit) that I wasn't doing all the other things that made for a good landing. My instructor then started breaking things down into manageable chunks, getting the pattern right and radio calls in a couple of flights, mastering the approach over the next few, and the touch down was surprisingly not too far behind! Even after I could make a reasonably good landing, I very often touched down with a bit of side loading. After several hours of couch-flying, some video-recorded landings, and many you-tube views later, I found I was focussing on the nose for too long after the flare. I asked my instructor to yell at me "eyes to the end" at every flare, and that helped me a lot with my rudder work.
Solo practice: After I finally did my first solo, I restricted my solo flights to the bare minimum mandatory requirements. Each individual's situation will of course be different, but for me, this delayed my readiness for the flight test. Once I realized I needed more practice, I got in a few more solo hours and this contributed immensely to my readiness and confidence for the flight test.
These then above are the contributing factors that made it longer for me to get my licence than I would have liked. Student pilots would do well to work with their instructor to identify learning styles and other factors that might influence their learning path before the flight test.
After-thought: In conclusion I would also like to comment on lesson plans as a contributing factor. I'm not sure if lesson plans can be changed or if they are prescribed and are set in stone, but I believe it would have helped immensely if I could have learned the approach-look and practiced the approach, from the first few lessons. In fact I have found that the single-most important part of the landing (for me at least) is getting the approach right. Before you go into the circuit, you spend quite a few lessons going out into the training area and then coming back in at the end of the lesson, where your instructor does the approach and landing. I believe those times could be used to give the student a sense of the circuit pattern, and especially the turn to base, configuring the aircraft for landing, and flying a stable approach, while the instructor does the actual landing.
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