Why does flight training usually start with (unsafe?) propeller planes and not with (safer?) jets?

Question

I live in the UK and would like to learn flying jets, but most courses seem to start with propeller planes. Not sure if this might be a misconception about the safety of different aircraft types, but I remember having read or heard somewhere that small propeller planes are, well, less safe than jets; maybe because they are more fragile and less powerful than jets when it comes to bad weather and are also difficult to recover from dangerous situations... not sure and cannot find the reference for now.

But also doing a quick search for popular aircraft types, the propellers like Cessna seem to have huge numbers of crashes/incidents compared to jet engine aircraft.

So the question is - why are propeller planes favored in training e.g. for the Private Pilot License? Is it simply because they are cheaper and wouldn't be such a huge loss of they crash?

Are there any alternatives where I could start with a jet engine?

Answer 1

Light Propeller Aircraft, if flown within their design limits, are just as safe as jets. If you do a proper and thorough daily inspection, you are far less likely to suffer any form of mechanical failure in the air. In saying this, the majority of all crashes, be it in a Jet Powered Airliner or a Propeller Driven Light Aircraft are caused due to pilot error.

You start out learning in a light single as:

1. They are lighter, and slower and can usually take the beating handed out by inexperienced pilots, this being:

   • Hard landings
   • Slipping onto the runway
   • Just hammering the day lights out of the engine.

2. Jet Aircraft are extremely expensive, and generally fairly heavy. Inexperienced pilots generally pay AU$80,000 for a Commercial Pilot License (In Australia) which qualifies you to fly single engine aircraft not over 5,700kg under the VFR by day. This is an absolute, level entry qualification looking for a job (most people will find that they at least also need a night VFR rating or a MECIR), so to add the cost of doing training in a jet on top of that, even if it is just for PPL, will be massive.

3. Jet Aircraft will be insured to be flown by pilots who have an amount of total experience and experience on aircraft/engine type. So, again, unless you're willing to pay the massive excess and premiums to be put on the insurance, you're going to have to fly a prop.

Now, you have identified that a lot of crashes are light singles (i.e. Cessna). This is because generally, these aircraft are not flown with the same discipline as a Jet Aircraft. Also, the pilots flying them are generally lower hour pilots who do not have as much experience (again, this is a generalisation, not an exact figure of the total community).

As for starting in a Jet, I honestly doubt that there is any flight school on the planet that will allow you to start training in a Jet (Even Fighter Jet pilots start out flying tiny little single engine aircraft).

Answer 2

In the hands of an inexperienced pilot, a jet is definitely the unsafer choice.

Due to the general higher speeds, there is less time to recover from errors and they require more anticipation to be ahead of the game. Small errors will grow into large errors in relatively short time. In slower aircraft there is more time to correct.

In addition, jet and turbine engines have slower response times than piston engines, which is important when you need to abort a landing for example.

The fact that there are more accident and incidents with propeller aircraft is telling little about the inherent safety of these aircraft, instead it says something about the relative inexperienced pilots that often operate them.

Answer 3

Small propeller aircraft have more incidents and accidents, because they can be flown by single pilot and that pilot is often not very experienced (PPL requires only 40 hours in US and 45 in Europe), while anything transport category requires two pilots and the pilot in command has to have ATPL and for that they need to have 1500 hours experience (yearly limit is 1000 hours). Note that transport category propeller aircraft like ATR-42/72 or Dash-8 don't have significantly higher accident rate compared to transport jets.

If flown by experienced pilots, a single engine plane is slightly less safe, because if the engine quits it has to do emergency landing and it may not always be possible over rough terrain.

On the other hand though, propeller planes are slower (propellers are efficient at slow speeds, jets only at high speeds) and easier to handle because jet engines react slowly to power changes. And smaller aircraft has less inertia, so it reacts to control inputs more readily too. Therefore you want to start with a small propeller aircraft in which mistakes can be more easily fixed, build up some experience with the general behaviour and only then progress to the faster and larger jets that require gentler handling and more thinking in advance.

Answer 4

Small piston airplanes are "cheap" (as airplanes go) to operate and jets are an order of magnitude more expensive. For example, you can find small piston trainers on the order of \$100/hour to operate whereas a jet is often well north of \$1000/hr to operate. If your wallet can accept this, this is just one barrier to starting training in a jet.

Small piston training airplanes are everywhere. Go down to your nearest airport and you'll probably find a few. Jet airplanes for training for the most part just do not exist. The vast majority of jet training happens in simulators, and these simulator courses are really only designed to provide type ratings and possibly ATP ratings, not primary training. This means you'll probably have to buy or lease a jet. This will be very expensive. This is your biggest barrier to starting training in a jet.

If you own or rent a jet, you want to insure it.  I sincerely doubt you'll find anyone willing to underwrite hull loss insurance on a jet used for primary training of an unrated pilot. Perhaps you could find coverage for a premium equal to the full replacement cost of the jet, but that really isn't practical. This is a barrier to training, but if you can afford to do this you might not care that you can't find insurance.

Speaking of type ratings, it is very likely you are going to need one of those to operate the jet, this will complicate your training and checkride because type ratings are tested to ATP standards, which means you will be required to fly to a higher standard with tighter tolerances than you would otherwise be requires at this stage of your training. You'll also be crippled without an instrument rating because you can't fly the jet above 18,000 feet (USA) without one.

Speaking of checkrides, you'll need to find an examiner that is typed in the jet you are using and who can conduct the checkride. Easier said than done. A typical jet isn't really suited to the private checkride either. The required cross country navigating with a map and the required diversion would be a lot of work in a very fast and complex airplane for a brand new pilot.

Before you can go on a checkride, you need training. You need a CFI who is typed in the jet and that CFI is going to be more expensive than the CFI you would be using in the piston airplane. Probably much more expensive. You will probably also need to spend much more time with the instructor than you would in the piston airplane because the jet moves much faster and you will be flying to ATP standards instead of private pilot standards. More practice == more money.

If you want to be in a jet ASAP and you can afford to own one and insure it, your best bet is to just do the private in a piston airplane then do an instrument rating in a piston airplane, do your multi-engine rating in a piston airplane, and then get a type rating in the jet to transition into flying the jet. You'll probably also need to hire a typed pilot to fly with you (for insurance costs) until you build a significant amount of time in the jet. If you didn't buy a jet capable of single pilot ops, then you'll need to hire a pilot because the plane requires two pilots anyway, but the entirety of my post assumes you picked a single pilot capable jet.

Answer 5

There are a lot of good answers here already that cover some of the most important answers: the extreme cost difference, jet engines respond slower, very low availability of training equipment and flight instructors, inability to (legally) fly the jet at the altitude it's designed to fly at (since you need an instrument rating to enter Class A airspace, which is everything above 18,000 ft in the U.S.,) etc.

However, another important thing to note is that you can practice maneuvers in a small, single-engine aircraft that simply aren't practical to practice in most jets. In a PA-28, it's no big deal to practice stalls and stall recovery (which is a required skill for a private pilot certificate.) Practicing stalls in a Learjet, let alone a 737, is quite another story. Same for 60 degree banks, slow flight, etc. These are things that all pilots need to practice, but which just aren't practical (or safe) to practice in most jets.

As for jets being 'safer,' as others have said, the safety record of light aircraft is more related to the average skill level of the pilots usually flying them versus the average skill level of the pilots usually flying jets. An airline pilot will have thousands of hours of flight time. Many accidents in small, single-engine aircraft, on the other hand, are from low-hour pilots and even student pilots. A student pilot flying a jet will be decidedly unsafe. Student pilots are much safer when flying small, light, and (relatively) slow aircraft that are also not nearly as complicated to operate. The light aircraft are much more forgiving to the mistakes that student pilots make than jets will be.

Answer 6

I've heard it claimed that small Cessnas are favoured by flight schools in part because they exhibit so many of the classic small-plane flaws in their handling. And, while it's relatively easy to get into trouble in a Cessna, it's also relatively easy to get out of it again, as it is specifically designed to recover cleanly from unusual flying attitudes if the pilot applies the correct techniques.

That means that the new pilot is introduced to these flaws, and the correct way to handle them, in the relative safety of having an instructor sitting next to them with duplicate controls, being at moderate altitude and generally not moving very fast. It also introduces an element of "if you can fly this, you can fly anything" - though that isn't literally true, as multi-engine aircraft, retractable gear and instrument flying are significant enhancements to difficulty as well as performance.

To use an automotive analogy, you shouldn't start a learner driver out in a 300hp sports car with an automatic or semi-automatic transmission, nor even in a 10-litre diesel-powered articulated lorry, even if he aspires to drive such a thing one day. It's much more likely that he'll be driving an 80hp hatchback with a manual transmission (at least in Europe), because that's what's affordable and has got plenty of performance for ordinary driving.

The real point is that the small, piston-engined aircraft is a good place to establish the basic skills, which are then built on if the pilot decides to move up to more capable aircraft later.

Answer 7

A big part of learning to fly is learning to "stay ahead of the airplane". Know what the airplane will NATURALLY do on its own, versus what you WANT it to do. Things happen a lot quicker in a jet, so a slower prop is a better place to learn this skill. One thing that pilots must learn is emergency procedures such as engine failure, and in a prop plane you have more time to make a safe decision about a forced landing.

Answer 8

I have been a pilot for 10 years you learn on a prop plane mostly because of the speed. The faster your going the faster you need to think and react to not get "behind the plane" I would also have to say that in my opinion prop planes are safer less to wrong slower and fly at a lower altitude. And in addition to that in case you crash it less cost for flight school to replace

Answer 9

To learn to run, you must learn to walk.

You do not simply hop into a jet aircraft much less a multi-engine one. In fact, most US military pilots started out in single engine prop based aircraft, The T-34 Mentor and T-28 Trojan. These have now replaced by the T-6 Texan and T-37 Tweet.

Prop planes are better to learn in and tend to be significantly more forgiving than Jets. One of the primary reasons is that with Piston powered Props (Turboprops behave more like jets) you have a more linear response when making throttle adjustments. This is important when performing maneuvers, especially during a landing where you may be forced to wave off suddenly and need to immediately apply throttle to abandon the maneuver. They also tend to be significantly less complex, allowing a pilot to focus on actually learning to fly rather than having to be overly concerned with nuances such as "hot starts", "Flameouts", compressor surge, and throttle lag (as initially mentioned).

Additionally, single jet planes are nowhere near ubiquitous as single prop planes, meaning finding a single jet to do training in is pretty difficult without owning one. In flight training you're limited by your certifications. Most GA (General Aviation) jet aircraft tend to be dual engine, requiring a multi-engine certification. Additionally you can't really fly Jet aircraft at their performance altitudes without being sufficiently licensed to do so.

The main issue I take with your question is the insinuation of prop planes being inherently unsafe. They're not, and to imply such is dishonest at best. Where you may see GA Single Engine Props being more accidents has to do with an effect we call "Survivorship Bias" where statistics incorrectly lead to a conclusion that is misled and misinformed. This goes back to the days of old warfighting aviation where they examined war birds that came back and noted their damage. Naturally one would want to armour up the places that got shot up the most, but what a person considering that is simply not being aware of, is that the plane had returned safely with that damage. A significant discovery, that those obviously damaged places did not need armour and upon examining planes that didn't return, other more vital places should be armoured instead.

Answer:

Jet pilots simply have more time in the aircraft. They have to. You start out in a prop aircraft to learn the fundamentals, and work your way up, eventually learning IFR operations and Multi-engine certifications to get into a Jet. You get more experience. Jets are an extremely poor choice for beginners as they are prone to overcorrection and subject to poor flight judgement in an inexperienced pilots hands. Things happen fast, there's a lot to be learned with judgement and speed. It's not for beginners.

The majority of GA Accidents involve single engine props because most pilots are learning on them and tend to be generally less experienced. Not because jets are inherently safer. In fact, jets are inherently more likely to have serious, expensive problems; many of which are not recoverable in the air. Maintenance is also significantly more costly.

Answer 10

There are probably more incidents with propeller aircraft for a few reasons. First jet pilots in the USA will have more experience (I concur with other posts that experience is a primary factor in this case). Certainly, propeller aircraft have limitations when compared to jet aircraft (less power). However, kept within their capabilities, propeller training aircraft are very safe. I would expect any pilot to agree that a small Cessna will more readily glide than jet aircraft. This learning to take off and land in a prop helps the student pilot get a feel for flying- a feel for the fluid force of air over the wings, nose, and tail.

Answer 11

One must remember that learning to fly is not just like learning to play a video game. A trainee pilot is expected to understand the aerodynamic behaviour of an aeroplane practically. The coordination of human reactions to the aerodynamic characteristics of the trainer aircraft is important, therefore good trainer aircraft are much sought after (that is why we had some legendary trainer aircraft like DH Tigermoth for example). Furthermore, at low subsonic speeds aircraft truly fulfill all the traits of a heavier than air classical aerodynamics. A propeller-driven slow-flying aircraft is definitely better, cheaper, more forgiving to a new pilot's mistakes. A pilot with initial training on a propeller-driven aircraft can easily graduate into flying jets.

Answer 12

Prop planes have a longer glide ratio. (they fly farther when the engine quits. ) My father would have said jets have the glide path of a rock, the slower they go, the faster they come down! Jets are also much more complex and sometimes simple is safer to maintain as well as fly.