My Instructor Shouted At Me and I Thought I Couldn't Do This
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
A student pilot shares an honest account of a difficult lesson, and asks whether anyone else has been there.
I want to write something that I suspect a lot of student pilots have felt but perhaps never said out loud. Last week, something happened during one of my flying lessons that left me sitting in my car in the car park for a good twenty minutes before I felt ready to drive home.
My instructor lost his temper with me in the air, and in that moment, I genuinely wondered whether I should carry on at all.
I am going to try to tell this story as honestly as I can, because I think honesty is what makes it worth reading.
What We Were Practising
We were working on stall recoveries. For anyone not yet at this stage of their training, a stall is not an engine failure. It is the point at which the wing stops producing lift effectively, usually because the angle at which it meets the air has become too steep. The aeroplane begins to sink, sometimes quite dramatically, and the correct recovery involves pushing the nose forward using the yoke, applying full power, and returning to normal flight. It sounds straightforward enough when you write it out like that.
I am learning in a PA28 Cherokee, and I want to say that I normally enjoy my lessons. There is something about flying that makes the rest of the world go quiet in a way I had never expected, and I have been genuinely excited about my progress. Stalls, though, have been a different matter entirely.
The Lesson That Went Wrong
I find stalls unsettling. The buffet, the nose dropping away, the sudden change in the feel of the controls, even though I understand intellectually that recovery is straightforward, my body does not seem to have received that memo. There is a moment in each stall where everything in me wants to pull back on the yoke and bring the nose up, which is, of course, precisely the wrong thing to do. Pushing forward is the correct input. Pulling back makes things worse - I know that.
But that is exactly what I kept doing. Or, in some cases, I would simply freeze and do nothing at all, which is equally unhelpful. My instructor was calling out corrections from the right seat firmly, but in those moments I was so consumed by what was happening (the sounds and the sensations that his voice felt like it was coming from somewhere far away. I don't think I was not being careless or dismissive. I was simply completely swamped. Every available bit of mental energy was being used just to process what the aeroplane was doing, and there was nothing left over to act on his instructions quickly enough.
After it happened for the third or fourth time, he raised his voice. Not a firm correction, but an actual shout. I do not want to repeat exactly what was said, partly out of fairness to him, but the gist was that I needed to listen and that this was basic stuff.
And something in me just fell apart a little.
What Was Going Through My Head
The thoughts came quickly and they were not kind ones.
"Maybe I'm just not up to this. I'm going to kill us both."
"I am paying this person hundreds of pounds an hour to make me feel stupid."
"I should just land the plane, walk away, and quit."
And then, somewhere underneath those thoughts: "Why is he overreacting? I'm still learning."
That last one is interesting to me in hindsight, because it reveals the confusion I was feeling. Part of me was frightened and embarrassed and wanted to defend myself. Another part of me thought that my instructor was not wrong to be frustrated. I had made the same error multiple times. He was tired of saying the same thing. But knowing that did not make the experience feel any less awful in the moment.
He took control and thinking back, I realise the aeroplane was nodding and lurching to the left.
What I understand now, sitting here a week later and writing this up, is that I was not being careless or stubborn. When the stall happened and the aeroplane started misbehaving, I reverted to instinct. Perhaps the instinct of a person who has never flown before is to pull back, to get the nose up, to get away from the ground. And perhaps that instinct is hardwired. Training is supposed to replace it, gradually, through repetition. But I was not there yet, and when the pressure mounted, instinct took over.
The Practicalities I Am Now Dealing With
Here is where it gets complicated, because this is not just an emotional problem. It is also a logistical one.
My instructor is a one-man operation. There is no senior instructor I can request, no colleague I can quietly move across to. If I want to continue with him, I continue. If I do not, I need to go elsewhere.
There are other schools at the airfield, and I have had a look at their websites. They are all perfectly reputable. They are also, without exception, more expensive than what I am paying now. Not by a small amount, either. When you are already looking at a licence that costs thousands of pounds to complete, those differences matter - at least to me.
I also feel a strange reluctance to just walk away. Part of me wonders whether I am being too sensitive, and whether an instructor losing patience once, in a moment of genuine frustration, is really grounds for leaving. Perhaps every student pilot has a lesson like this at some point. Perhaps this is just part of the process. I genuinely don't know.
What I do know is that I am not sure I want to get back in that aeroplane with him just yet. And that feeling, the reluctance to go back, is new for me. Before this, I would have been checking the weather forecast and hoping for a lesson every single day.
What I Think I Would Tell Another Student Pilot in the Same Situation
I have been reflecting on this a great deal, and I want to be careful not to turn this into something it is not. I am not trying to paint my instructor as a villain. He has taught me a great deal, and on most days he is patient and thorough. One bad lesson does not erase that.
At the same time, I do not think it is unreasonable to expect that an instructor, however frustrated, maintains a professional tone. We were not in a military cockpit with seconds to spare. We were in a training environment, practising a manoeuvre, and I was making the kind of mistakes that student pilots make. That is why we have dual controls. That is what the training process is for.
I've also been thinking about the next stage. He still helps me to land the aeroplane and we haven't looked at circuits formally yet - so I dread the thought of getting shouted at close to the ground.
If you are a student pilot reading this and you have had a similar experience, I think the most important thing to hold onto is this: struggling with stalls, or with any manoeuvre, does not mean you cannot fly. It means you have not practised it enough yet. The brain and the hands need repetition to build new habits, particularly when those habits run against instinct. It's just how learning works.
I also think it is worth knowing your options. If an instructor-student relationship has broken down to the point where you dread getting into the aeroplane, that is worth taking seriously. A bad lesson can be recovered from. A persistent atmosphere of anxiety in the cockpit is harder to shake, and it genuinely affects your ability to learn.
Where I Am Now
I have not booked my next lesson yet. I am going to give it a couple of weeks and see how I feel. I am also seriously considering having a conversation with my instructor before we go up again, just to clear the air. I think that is probably the adult thing to do, even if the thought of it makes me uncomfortable.
What I know for certain is that I have not given up. The licence is still the goal. The sky is still where I want to be. This was a bad day, and bad days happen. But I would be lying if I said it had not upset me.
If you have been here, or if you have advice from the other side of it, I would really appreciate hearing from you. Whether you are a student who has had a similar lesson, a qualified pilot who remembers what this felt like, or even an instructor with a perspective I might be missing, I am genuinely open to all of it. I could do with a few friendly voices right now.
QuizAero Adds:
If you've had a similar experience or have any advice for this student, please comment below.
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