The Real PPL Timeline

By Parker Thomas

A phase-by-phase guide to what you'll learn, when you'll learn it, and why it's taught in this order

You're somewhere in the middle of flight training, and you're wondering: How much longer? What's next? Am I behind?

Those are normal questions. The problem is that most answers you'll find online are just a single number — "the national average is 65 to 75 hours" — which tells you almost nothing useful. It doesn't tell you what those hours are made of, why some skills come before others, or where you are on the map.

At East Bay Flight, we use The Finer Points flight training curriculum — a structured, 10-phase syllabus developed over 20 years by award-winning CFI Jason Miller. It's designed to build skills in a specific order so that each new thing you learn builds on the shoulders of everything before it. Nothing is random. Every lesson has a purpose.

The Big Picture: 3 Stages, 10 Phases, 57 Lessons

Your training is organized into three stages:

• Pre-Solo (Phases 1–7, Lessons 1–31): Fly the airplane safely by yourself.

• Advanced Training (Phases 8–9, Lessons 28–39): Performance landings, cross-country, night, instruments.

• Checkride Prep (Phase 10, Lessons 40–42): Mock checkrides, stage checks, polish to ACS standards.

The FAA minimum is 40 flight hours. The national average, according to DPE Jason Blair's data from hundreds of checkrides, is about 76 hours. With accelerated, high-frequency training — flying 3 to 4 times per week in structured 3-hour blocks — most students finish closer to 55–65 hours. The difference isn't talent; it's consistency and curriculum design.

Stage 1: Pre-Solo

Phase 1 — Basic Training

Intro Flight + Ground Lesson 1

Before you ever touch the controls, you'll learn how we approach flying. You'll learn the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that you'll use on every single flight: how to brief a flight, preflight the airplane, communicate on the radio, and organize a cockpit. Think of this as learning to set up your workstation before doing any actual work.

Phase 2 — Basic Aircraft Control

Flight Lessons 2–6

This is where you learn to actually fly — but not the way you might expect. We don't start with landings. We start with the most fundamental relationship in aviation: power controls altitude, pitch controls airspeed.

Over six lessons: the Four Fundamentals (climbs, descents, turns, straight-and-level), airspeed changes, minimum controllable airspeed, coordination exercises, stall exercises, and your first Demonstration Day to perform these.

Why this order matters: Every one of these skills is a building block for landing. Airspeed control, coordination, energy management, flying at slow speeds — you're learning all the component pieces before you ever see a runway.

A note on instruments: During this phase, your flight instruments are covered or the glass panel is dark. You're learning to fly by looking outside — at the horizon, at the sight pictures, at the Lindbergh Reference out the sides of the front window. This builds a foundation that instruments alone never can.

Phase 3 — Basic Aircraft Maneuvers

Flight Lessons 7–9

This phase is about airplane mastery. Steep Turns at 45° of bank teach you to manage the airplane under higher G-loads, control the overbanking tendency, and maintain altitude with power adjustments. Power-Off Stalls prepare for what might happen if you stall on final approach. You'll set pattern power, fly the right airspeeds, add flaps progressively, and practice the go-around — your escape hatch for a bad approach. By the time you fly a real traffic pattern, the mechanics will already be familiar.

Combined with the slow flight, stall recovery, and coordination skills from Phase 2, you now have all the pieces that landing is made of: energy management, speed control, flying at the edge of the envelope, and pattern procedures. The phase wraps with a Demonstration Day where you perform Slow Flight, Steep Turns, and Power-Off Stalls to ACS (checkride) standards, with your instructor observing silently.

Phase 4 — Advanced Aircraft Maneuvers

Flight Lessons 10–13

Lazy eights, turning stalls, spin prevention, and power-on stalls. This is exploring all of the airplane's capabilities. When you complete this phase, the high-airwork foundation is done and we move toward landing the airplane. Flight instruments become available again — you've earned them.

Phase 5 — Ground Reference Maneuvers

Flight Lessons 14–16

You come down from the practice area: turns around a point, S-turns across a road, rectangular course. These teach you to fly a consistent ground track while the wind pushes you around — which is exactly what a traffic pattern is. You'll also learn pilotage and low-altitude contingency planning.

Phase 6 — Mastering Landings

Flight Lessons 17–22

The key insight: by the time you get here, you already know most of what landing requires. Landing is the practical application of skills you've been building since Lesson 1.

Six lessons break it into components:

Lesson 17 — Aiming Points & Go-Arounds: Stabilized approaches, seeing your touchdown point, and the go-around.

Lesson 18 — The Round Out: The trigger reference point, transitioning from descent to the flare, recovering from a balloon.

Lesson 19 — Touchdown: The flare, contact with the runway, and the rollout.

Lesson 20 — Landing Decision-Making: Forward slips, drift exercises, 180° power-off approaches, simulated engine failure after takeoff.

Lesson 21 — Crosswind Techniques: Crosswind takeoffs and landings.

Lesson 22 — Scenario Flight: Pattern work at a new airport, putting it all together.

If you're stuck on landings right now: Think about when you were 16 and learning to drive. Parking seemed impossibly hard — judging the distances, figuring out where the corners of the car were, getting into a tight spot. It felt like you'd never get it. Now you park without thinking. The same thing will happen with landings. Your brain is building a mental model of where the airplane is in relation to the runway, and that model just needs repetitions to solidify. It's not a knowledge problem; it's a calibration problem, and calibration only comes from practice.

Phase 7 — Emergency Procedures & First Solo

Flight Lessons 23–27 + Stage Check + Solo Flights 1–2

Simulated system failures (engine, alternator, lost comms), engine-out scenarios, cabin fire procedures, emergency descents. Then a mock phase check, a peer-reviewed Pre-Solo Stage Check with another instructor, and finally:

Your first solo. Three trips around the pattern, alone. One of the most memorable days in any pilot's life.

Stage 2: Advanced Training

Phase 8 — Performance Takeoffs & Landings

Flight Lessons 28–30 + Solo Flights 3–4

Short-field techniques, soft-field techniques, and night operations — interspersed with solo flights to maintain and sharpen your maneuvers.

Phase 9 — Cross-Country Operations

Ground Lesson 2, Flight Lessons 31–39, Solo Flights 5–10

The longest phase. You'll start with dead reckoning and pilotage on paper charts (no GPS), progress through basic instrument maneuvers and radio navigation, fly night cross-countries, then integrate modern EFB tools. The phase culminates with three solo cross-countries, including the "long solo" (150 NM, three stops) that fulfills the Part 61 requirement.

The technology transition: You spent the first half of training with instruments covered, using paper charts, doing math by hand. Now that you understand what the technology actually does, you use it — and you use it better than someone who never learned the fundamentals.

Stage 3: Checkride Preparation

Flight Lessons 40–42 + Ground Lesson 3 + Solo Flight 11

Mock checkride. Solo practice to ACS standards. Ground review of written test and oral prep. Second mock checkride aimed at being harder than the real thing. Final Stage Check — a peer-reviewed evaluation that should be the hardest day of your training.

"There is a reason that baseball players swing with two bats before they go up to the plate; it makes the real thing easier."

The goal: You walk out of your checkride saying, "That was easy."

The national average is 65–76 hours. With consistent, focused training, you can be on the efficient end. But the hours aren't the point. The point is that when you pass that checkride, you're not just legal — you're genuinely competent and safe. That's what this curriculum is designed to produce.