By EWAN KENNEDY
13 November 2006

Had an interesting chat to a lucky young fellow the other night. He came from a wealthy family in the bush, so Dad had his own private plane, just a little single-engined five-seater, but what more could a growing youngster have wished for in the family garage?

He had learned to fly from the age of just six by sitting on Dad's knee and taking hold of the controls. He couldn’t reach the pedals at that stage, but learned how to steer and even make the plane rise and fall (not fall in the extreme sense, of course!).

Which was great fun and he thought his Dad was some sort of a god for owning and flying his own plane. In reality I suspected that Dad wasn’t all that good at flying and had passed a lot of sloppy bad habits onto junior.

The years passed and the young fellow got a license and was able to fly solo, which he described as the best thing that had ever happened in his life to that time. Freedom, independence, the ability to get to interesting places in a short time. Sounded just wonderful.

He told me he was anxious to improve his flying ability, perhaps one day even become a commercial pilot. But the authorities warned him about the dangers of learning more about flying.

They talked him out trying to improve his plane control, or of getting lessons on how to take the correct action if something went unexpectedly wrong during a flight.

They said it wasn’t wise to know more about being a better pilot. Otherwise he would become over-confident and take too many risks.

They told him that if he learned how to do emergency landings there was a danger that he would do these even when they weren’t necessary. So it was better not to know anything about the subject.

The overriding message he got was that if he insisted on trying to be a better flier, he would actually finish up being a worse pilot and more likely to crash.

Utterly ridiculous? Of course it is and I freely admit to having made up all of the above.

But substitute the word ‘driver’ for ‘pilot’ and then read it again…

Scary isn’t it that kids are often taught to drive by their dads, not by professional instructors? Even more worrying is the insistence by Australian authorities that learning any more than basic control of a car makes them worse drivers, not better ones.

Is there any other aspect of life where extra training is considered to be a bad thing? Certainly none that I know of, yet we keep on hearing that teaching young (or not so young) drivers more about what they are doing will only lead to more crashes. Something I find impossible to believe.