ORIGINAL: RCKen
ORIGINAL: RVM
Seriously, if you think about it, most everything in our hobby, at least on the hobby level, should be intuition. One should be able to look at the way an elevator moves and figure out what kind of basic effect it is going to have on an airplane.
Unfortunately that is not the case. To you it may be obvious what is supposed to happen. But as you said earlier you are exposed to aviation so you know what's supposed to happen. But to most people it's not that way. They need to be taught how it is supposed to work. That's how us humans work, we learn things. I for one could say that it should be completely obvious how a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection should be routed through a firewall into the internal mail server on a TCP/IP network. It's simple....... For me, because that is what I do for a living. Or a doctor could say that how the human heart works is simple and everybody should be able to understand the basics of it. I could go on, but the point I am trying to make is that what is obvious to you is not to other people, and to make assumptions that everybody should be able to understand something is just not correct.
Frankly, I also prefer to learn things on my own, whether I succeed or fail. You learn more this way. Unless, of course, you are one of those who are easily discouraged by a minor setback.
The problem with this is that if a person fails it could injure somebody. An out of control airplane is quite capable of killing somebody.
All of this said, I think that for most people an instructor is the way to go. It's safer (which is the most important aspect) and for most people easier.
For those that have been able to teach themselves how to fly, I say congratulations. You deserve a pat on the back. But as I have said earlier in this thread, you are the one out of a thousand that can do that and succeed. But you have to understand why everybody on is making a huge deal over this. While it may have been easy for you, it isn't going to be that easy for everybody. If we didn't make a point of all of the difficulties involved with this hobby we would be doing a disservice to all of the beginners that come here looking for advice. If we didn't' step up on situations like this and make these points a lot of people would walk away from here thinking how easy it is to learn to fly, and then find out the cold hard truth when they are picking up the pieces of their crashed airplane. We are just trying to keep all of those out there grounded in the reality of what the real world is like.
I understand where both of you are coming from. But you have to realize that you may have only seen one beginner (yourself) since you have been in the hobby. Or maybe a few beginners. But you have to realize that between the more experienced members that frequent this forum (Myself, Piper_chuck, Bruce88123, BubbaGates, and others) we have seen hundreds (if not thousands) of students, so we have seen a lot. I can assure you that we have seen all of the types of beginners that there are, all the way from the "timid,doesn't know anything,hangs on your every word, and won't even unload his car without your permission" beginner all the way through to "I fly the real thing, I know every thing about aviation, these are just toys that can't possibly hurt anyone, go away I don't need your help" beginner. We've seen it all. All we are doing here is trying to temper what is being said with a dose of reality for the other beginners that are reading this so that they know how the real world is for them. I do apologize if you thought we were personally attacking either of you, because that isn't what we are doing.
Ken