Why I started pricing flying lessons
Six attempts, one instructor with a temper, one pensioner with wisdom, and a brake pedal that was not mine
There was an evening, somewhere between the fourth and fifth attempt, when I opened a tab and looked up what it costs to learn to fly a small aeroplane.
Not as a joke. I wanted the number, because the number I was already committed to had lost all connection to the thing I was buying.
Here is the full record, since there is no dignity left to protect.
Six attempts
First. The examiner failed me and explained it in one sentence: “I didn’t feel safe.” No specific mistake, no moment to point at. Just a verdict on the general atmosphere in the car, which was, to be fair, tense.
Second. A five way junction. I did not understand who had priority and I behaved accordingly. That one was mine.
Third. I did not make it out of the TÜV car park. My instructor had been telling me for weeks to show confidence, so I showed confidence to a bus on the main road while pulling out. I have since run the geometry in my head many times and I am fairly sure a collision was not physically possible. My instructor did not run the geometry. He pressed his brake. And that is the end of the exam, immediately, regardless of what the bus was or was not about to do.
Fourth. A Baustelle. We came out the other side of it, everyone around me put their foot down, and so did I, because that is what the traffic was doing and the traffic is very persuasive.
The problem was the yellow line. It was still painted on the road, which means the construction layout was still in force, which means thirty was still the limit. For me, specifically, while everyone else went bananas around me. I was wrong and I knew the rule. I just believed the other cars more than I believed the paint.
Worth knowing: in Germany, on exam day, there is no sign on the car. Nothing tells the drivers around you that the person at the wheel is being examined. They treat you like any other car, which is the point and also brutal; it is exactly why the flow of traffic is such a convincing argument right up until it costs you the exam.
Fifth. I genuinely cannot remember the reason. Most likely I deserved that one too.
Sixth (with a new instructor). Passed.
The instructor problem
For the first five I had an instructor with a temper.
Although temper is not quite the word. Some days he would get angry and sad at the same time, which is a strange thing to sit next to at forty kilometres an hour. I asked him once what was wrong. He said “I don’t know.” Not as a way of ending the conversation. He genuinely did not seem to know.
Someone at the school told me later that he was heartbroken, or something like that, and then added that they did not really know either. So that is where it rests. A man was going through something, and the place he was going through it was the passenger seat of a car with a nervous student in it.
I will not pretend I was an easy student. I had real trouble with parts of it and I was full of doubt, and doubt in traffic looks exactly like incompetence. But being shouted at in a car does not teach anybody anything. It adds a second thing to manage while you are already managing the first.
Changing instructors inside a driving school is not a form you fill in. It took arguing, repeating myself, and being that difficult customer nobody wants to be, over weeks, while still paying for lessons I was not learning from.
That delay is the part I would warn people about. If it is not working, it will not become working by waiting, and the clock is billing you the whole time.
The pensioner
The replacement was an older man, long retired from something else, calm in a way that made the car feel bigger.
The difference between the two of them showed up in the first ten minutes, over something small.
The first one had told me I was taking the automatic. Not asked. The school had a view on it, and the view arrived as an instruction.
The new one asked which I wanted. I said I prefer manual, but the school told me automatic is better. He said: choose what you feel like.
That is the whole difference, and it is worth more than it sounds. One of them handed me a decision already made. The other one handed me back the decision. I did end up buying an automatic car years later, so the advice was probably fine. Nobody had asked me, and after five failed exams the one thing I had none of left was the sense that any of it was mine to decide.
On his first day he said he could not understand why I did not have the licence already. On his second day he understood perfectly. The difference between those two days was him watching me hesitate.
Then there was this exchange, which I think about more than is reasonable.
He asked why I had not looked left. I said because I had right of way. He asked what happens if I look left and see two truck headlights getting bigger and bigger.
I said hmm.
He said: you wake up in hospital and the nurse tells you, Sia, you are very lucky, you had right of way. But we had to amputate your legs.
I have never forgotten to check left again.
His other move was stranger and better. During another student’s lesson he put me in the back seat and told me to be the examiner. Watch, decide what you would mark, say when you would stop the car.
Twenty minutes of watching somebody else drive taught me more than several of my own lessons. From the back seat you see how little of it is about controlling the vehicle and how much is about reading the road early. You also see how obvious hesitation looks from outside, which is a cure for a particular kind of self-consciousness.
Perspective is a teaching tool and almost nobody uses it.
The thing I keep turning over
Now the criticism, and I want to put it carefully, because I failed five exams and the system did not make me do that.
The person who decides whether you are ready is also the person selling you the preparation.
Nobody has to be a villain for that to be a problem. A school earns per lesson. A student who needs more lessons is better business than one who needs fewer. “You are nearly there, let us book a few more” is both a plausible professional judgement and the most profitable sentence available, and from the passenger seat you cannot tell which one you are hearing.
Failure is good business in aggregate too. Another attempt means more lessons, another fee, another month. I am not claiming anyone wanted me to fail. I am saying that if you set out to design a slow, expensive process, it would look a lot like this one, and nobody in it would need to behave badly.
The honest counter-argument is strong and I hold it myself. Cars kill people. The standard is high because the consequences land on somebody else’s family. A cheaper and faster route would have put a worse driver on the road, and that driver would have been me.
So my complaint is narrower than “they should have passed me sooner”. It is that the seller holds the deciding vote, and nothing in the structure corrects for it.
What would actually help
Publish the numbers. Pass rates per school, average lessons to licence, average total cost, somewhere a seventeen year old can compare before committing. The exam is already independent, which is the part of the design that works. Make the teaching side equally visible.
Offer fixed price to licence. The moment a school’s profit depends on getting you there efficiently rather than on volume, the incentive flips.
And make changing instructor a normal, easy thing rather than a fight. Half my problem was not driving. It was spending months with the wrong teacher because switching was harder than enduring.
And then it was over
I passed on the sixth attempt and walked out holding a sheet of paper. No card. The card comes later, by post, from an office that was not in the room. After all of it, the moment itself is a printed page and a signature.
And the first feeling was not relief. It was a kind of vertigo.
The thing had been the organising structure of my calendar for so long that I genuinely did not know what to do with the time. What now. What do people do on a Saturday morning if they are not failing a driving exam.
I drive a few times a year. The licence cost more than the driving has been worth, and I would still not want a system that hands them out.
The flying tab is still open somewhere. It costs more and takes longer, and nobody pretends otherwise at the start, which by now sounds like a feature.