It would be interesting to see who exactly is so eager to prove you can learn on your own.

I mean, is it a macho thing, or a young thing, is there some commonality.

When I first started (I'm 40 now) I was pretty timid about going out to a club full of guys I didn't know and looking stupid. However, I had a friend a few years back who put together a glow trainer, drooled over it all winter, then the first nice day he took it to the field, the instructor didn't show up, so he started taxiing around until he broke ground.

Ten seconds later, he found the ground again. As far a I know, he never tried again.

So, I think its bad (yes bad) to encourage ANYONE to try flying a glow trainer without an instructor, no matter how much sim time you have.

So, I would be sincerely interested in finding out if the "You can do it yourself" is an "X-games" mentality, or if there is some other commonality.

From what I've seen, it doesn't seem to be age-based, but its hard to really tell from these posts.

Does anyone who did it alone want to provide some demographic data?

Tim