Moreover, no one has yet invented a reliable way for a jet driver to injure passengers without putting self at the same hazard. In the right seat or across the desk in the flight office, I am trying to prepare each student, one at a time, to face a demanding wilderness with single systems, little or no radio babysitting, and with zero instrument flying capability. There is no doubt that short field takeoff and landing training will be applied to clear spruce and birch at the end of a strip by a fish camp. At many strips, the pilots have to get better each year because trees continue growing without heed to the needs of airplanes. Soft field takeoffs and landings truly must be mastered before certification.
Alaskan airports are many, paved airports few.
Landing on beaches and isolated roads is quite common. After Private certification, the Alaskan student almost certainly will, with time, experience and access to more capable airplanes down the line, venture far beyond sophisticated weather reporting or accurate forecasting. Mountains far higher than any in the Lower 48 create weather changes in their lee, invisible to distant weather briefers. The skeletal weather knowledge acquired for Private licensure may be an unofficial meteorologist's only reference when she sits in the left seat of a floated Cessna at the end of a lake in the sunset at 11 o'clock at night, wondering what the shifting cloud patterns in the red sky imply about getting through the passes that stand between her and her home slip across the Alaska Range. Teaching weather here has to mean far more than seeing that students can get past that portion of the FAA written.