"Learning to Fly" means earning what the FAA calls a Private Pilot License (PPL). A PPL allows you to fly for fun, adventure, and personal business. You can bring friends along, and fly in the day or at night, so long as the weather allows you to maintain several miles of visibility and stay clear of clouds. 

 

On average, earning your PPL takes about a year, in which you'll accumulate about 100 hours of flight time. I encourage students to plan for two 3-hour lessons a week. The frequency and length of lessons will change as we're learning different things.

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Earning your PPL is a huge accomplishment, and for many people this is as far as they want to go. But there are many other certificates and ratings available beyond your PPL. The most common are an Instrument Rating (allowing you to fly through clouds), a Commercial License (allowing you to be paid to fly), and a Multi-Engine Rating (allowing you to fly a twin-engine airplane).

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You can explore my PPL curriculum here. The process breaks into three main phases:

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Pre-Solo. This phase prepares you to "solo", which means making three takeoffs and landings by yourself, with no one else in the plane. There's a lot to learn to get ready for that, including basic airplane control, radio communications, airport operations, takeoff and landing, aerial maneuvers, and much more.

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Navigation and Cross-Country Flight. This phase trains you to go places! You'll learn how to get weather briefings; navigate using pilotage, dead-reckoning, and radio navigation aids; plan for arrival at an unfamiliar airport; and make the all-important go/no-go decision.

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Night Flying and Checkride Preparation. In this final phase, we'll learn the additional skills required to fly at night, and review all the knowledge and flight maneuvers you'll need to pass your FAA checkride.

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One last thing. In parallel with all the training above, there's a lot of knowledge you need to acquire, and an FAA written exam you need to pass. The process of preparing for that exam is called ground school, and you can do it in one of two ways. You can attend a class, either online or in person, with other pilot learners (see https://wvfc.org/learning-to-fly/ and click on 'Ground Schools'), or follow a video-based ground school course like this one.

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West Valley Flying Club has additional resources on learning to fly, here.