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Any of you ever take your parents car/ boat with out permission or before you had a drivers lic?
Not much of a difference and this kid( 17yr old) already knew how to fly.
Your pissed right now, I get it. he is 17, a 3-4 month punishment is enough.
no one got hurt.
You should still teach him to fly.
Have him detail the plane weekly and have him go and apologize to her parents
In due time get him back in the plane, it's a bond you two will forge that will last a life time.
You and him will reminisces over this when he is older.
If your to hard on him he'll fly the coop the day he turns 18.
I think you maybe over reacting, as your searching for a 17yr old all night kind of tells me this.
It's not about what a 17 year-old CAN do, snofarmer.
It's about not being responsible enough to follow the rules.
It's about abusing power and privilege.
I have a 16-year old son who is normally very well-behaved, respectful, and responsible. But recently, he has gotten into major trouble.
I own a time-share in a small 4-seat single-engine airplane, along with 3 other people. I have had this aircraft for several years now, and have often taken my wife and my son up in it for rides. I am certificated as a Flight Instructor and my son wanted to learn to fly himself, so I have been teaching him. But he is not ready to actually go for his pilot's license yet (he must be 17 first anyway- he will be turning 17 in December). He has soloed and has a "Student Pilot Certificated", which allows him to fly by himself, but not with passengers, and only under close supervision.
On Saturday night, after my wife and I had gone to bed, he snuck out, picked up his girlfriend (who is also 16), and the two of them went joy-riding in my airplane!!
I was asleep when he snuck out, but I woke up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to get a drink of water. I looked out the kitchen window at the street and noticed my car was gone. I went back upstairs and saw that the door to my son's room was open and I saw that he was not in bed. So I woke my wife up we realized he must have snuck out. So I took her car to go look for him while she waited at home in case he came back. Needless to say, we were worried sick about him. My wife suspected he might be with his girlfriend so she called the girlfriend's parents as I was leaving. When I got her car keys, I noticed that my keys to the airplane were gone from the shelf where we keep our keys. It crossed my mind that my son might have taken the airplane but I thought to myself that he would never do anything so monumentally stupid. Boy, was I wrong. About 5 minutes after I left, My wife called me on my cell phone and said she had talked to my son's girlfriend's father and she was not at home either. I looked for him for another 20 minutes before my wife called to say that my son and his girlfriend had been caught by her parents when he dropped her off at her house and she tried to sneak back in. It was about 3:00 in the morning at this point. So I went home and my wife and I went over to pick up our son. He seemed sheepish about what he'd done and I think he realized that he is in big trouble. My wife told him we were very disappointed in him. I asked him about the airplane key and he denied taking it but when we got home, his girlfriends parents called again and said their daughter told them she and my son had gone for a flight in my airplane! As you would expect, they were livid that their daughter had been on a plane flown by 16-year-old kid with no pilot's license. I was furious at my son, too, for being so foolish and dangerous. I was to angry to deal with the situation then so I sent him to bed.
On Sunday, after my son got up, I took his Student Pilot Certificate and tore it up right in front of him. I told him I was discontinuing his flight training since he has proven he's not responsible enough to fly. I also told him that he was grounded until further notice.
I was wondering what else I should do about this, and what would be a good punishment? He risked both his life and his girlfriend's life by flying at NIGHT without a pilot's license and they could have been killed. He also deliberately disobeyed me and FAA REGULATIONS about the privileges student pilots have. If the FAA had found out about this little episode, they would certainly have revoked his student pilot certificate and done who knows what else. He is basically a good kid but he showed extremely poor judgment and apalling irresponsibility in what he did this weekend.
So far, his punishment is:
-I am discontinuing his flight training, permanently. He broke the law by flying without a license and he has proven he is not responsible enough to be a pilot.
-He is grounded from leaving the house, and from TV, computer, video games, phone, seeing friends or his girlfriend (which hardly matters as her parents have forbidden her to ever see him again), and desserts. He has not been allowed to go anywhere except school.
Is this a good punishment? And how long should he be grounded for? I am thinking at least a few months, possibly longer. What do you think? Is there anything else I should be doing.
I'd be turning him in to the FAA and let them mete out some punishment too.
Yes I do and it was/is not the end of the world.
No one got hurt.
Don't punish him for what if's
I bet you have broken a few rules in your time.
should he get off without a punishment ? No.
but, just because it's a "plane" does not make this a major case.
Steeling the car is also a abuse of power and privilege.
I stole my bro in law 48 ft yacht. For a drunken party.
I had to clean it the rest of the summer as my punishment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stan4
It's not about what a 17 year-old CAN do, snofarmer.
It's about not being responsible enough to follow the rules.
It's about abusing power and privilege.
He also deliberately disobeyed me and FAA REGULATIONS about the privileges student pilots have. If the FAA had found out about this little episode, they would certainly have revoked his student pilot certificate and done who knows what else.
Six long months of grounding. Three months without video games. And if he breaks your rules, straight to military school. I'm not kidding.
This isn't like just breaking curfew by taking Dad's car without permission. This was an action that was worse on a whole different level, one that was illegal in a host of ways. You wouldn't have gotten in Dutch with the local police. You would have been answering to the FAA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and God knows who else. And that's if his actions had been discovered after a safe landing. What if there had been an accident and he had been killed, along with the girlfriend? You might as well have packed up the wife, withdrawn your life savings from the bank and left the country. Because you would have been financially and legally ruined by the consequences. The scenarios are just too awful to contemplate.
I'm undecided. A big part of me agrees with snofarmer, and my husband has a few hair-curling stories from his teen years. I also think that if a punishment is very harsh, there's nowhere to go if bad behavior continues or escalates. However, if bad behavior continues with the plane (he takes it again, for instance, and gets caught by the authorities), decisions about punishment will be made by a judge instead of Dad. Three months of chores would probably pale in comparison.
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