[304065]

Ditto to all of the above. I got my Private in 1993 in a C-150. It had such luxury appointments as electric flaps (which nearly killed me one afternoon) and a Nav/Com, useful for finding one's way when lost (which occasionally happened for about sixty seconds per episode, but it feels like an hour).

Here's the thing: modern General Aviation aircraft are getting better and better, and offer stuff like ballistic recovery parachutes, flat-panel LCD displays, solid state attitude gyros, GPS navigation and integrated downlink weather. All of which make flying more comfortable and add an additional margin of safety.

They are all, however, USELESS to the beginning pilot, who needs nothing more than common sense, a sectional chart and a pay phone on which to call the weather briefer. You first start off by learning how the airplane flies and handles at the bottom end of the flight envelope by working the traffic pattern and doing fundamental maneuvers. With that begun, you can then work on the basics of avigation, starting out with "pilotage," or comparision of what you see out the window to what you see on the map, and then move up to "ded reckoning," or following a compass heading for a specific time and comparing the landscape that passes below you to reference points on the chart. In this way, you learn the fundamentals of "contact" flying, which is the fundamental building block for everything else.

The great thing about starting out is that you DON'T need a glass-cockpit composite retractable four-place pressurized turbine single certified for flight into known icing conditions with a flushing toilet and GPWS. Which is a good thing, because if you did, nobody would be able to afford flying unless they had the resources of a small government.

The good old C-172 is more than enough to take you through the Private and into the realm of Instrument Flying, which is where things really get interesting, and at that point when additional technology becomes critcal, not just useful. But even then, ther'es much to be learned from starting with the old ADF and learning basics of radio navigation, orientation, homing and other old-school stuff.

One more thing to add: Real Pilots fly Taildraggers!