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• Home
• 1 - And So Begins A Journey
• 2 - First Things First
• 3 - I'm 'Fliming!'
• 4 - In The Air Junior Birdman!
• 5 - From The Ground School Up
• 6 - The Hang Of It
• 7 - Hot Dog!
• 8 - Banking Toward Success
• 9 - Ground Pounding
• 10- Back In The Saddle |
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- Current Anxiety Gauge Reading -
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If you have a comment about my quest, or a memory of learning to fly, send it in via email. I may post it here, subject to editing.
• Hi Max,
I just finished reading through your entries and I found many similarities between my own flight training and yours. Ground school was a lot to absorb in a short period of time. Since I am at Embry-Riddle, the ground school was in a class of about 45-50 people and 4 days a week for an hour each. It was mind boggling how much material there was to learn. Fortunately for me I had taken previous classes in Weather and Systems which gave me the basis for some of the material. Through my training, I frequently used GLEIMs. They are questions very similar to what you will encounter on the FAA written and helped me tremendously. It covers all the material you need to know, but in short sections of just facts. Very easy to read and understand and after the outline section there are questions taken almost directly from the outline. It was quite helpful. There is also a disc you can buy with sample Written tests, duplicated down to the color of the background and font size.
While I am not a flight instructor, from my own experiences of having the anxiety meter at the AAAAHHHHH!!!!! level, I can tell you the more you fly the more comfortable you become. Also let me qualify that. I was one of those students who had to be ready to solo at a set point. Maybe not the number of hours set, but ERAU has a specific curriculum and when its time to solo, its time to solo. I had to go through two stage checks to get to my "dual solo" activity. It was essentially two not so strict check rides to see if I was a safe pilot who knew all the procedures to fly a plane. The first was with my instructor to see if I was ready to go up with a standards pilot and the second, with a standards pilot. I failed the first flight with a standards pilot and it was quite a blow to my morale. I went up with a few more flights with my instructor and fixed what I had messed up on and went up again with a standards pilot. This time I passed and two days later I soloed in a Cessna 172. I did three traffic patterns at an isolated airport and it was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. I guess I should stop getting ahead of myself though. I look forward to reading future FLOG posts.
Anyway. Good luck with the rest of your flight training and I hope our paths cross again in the future.
Your Friend,
- Andrew Zaback
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• Home
• 1 - And So Begins A Journey
• 2 - First Things First
• 3 - I'm 'Fliming!'
• 4 - In The Air Junior Birdman!
• 5 - From The Ground School Up
• 6 - The Hang Of It
• 7 - Hot Dog!
• 8 - Banking Toward Success
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Entry #9 March 13th, 2010 • Ground Pounding
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Baby Rain-- |
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BR stands for 'mist' on the weather METARS, but my instructor calls it baby rain. It's been nothing but baby rain all week, as Spring tries its best to shove Old Man Winter out of the way. That means no flying. I haven't flown for 23 days and counting, due to one problem or another, and I'm starting to get cranky. Now that I've gotten addicted to flying, the withdrawal symptoms are no fun! |
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Ground Pounding-- |
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Ground School marches on though. It is two parts fascinating and one part exasperating. First of all, my forebears might be the "Greatest Generation", but they were also sadistic mathematicians and code makers, who delighted in coming up with confusing and clumsy ways to find your way or read a chart or tell you what the weather is doing. I have heard lots of phrases like, "Nobody ever uses this anymore, but it will be on the test." And other ones like, "This would make more sense if you were flying." By the end of March I'm supposed to take THE TEST. The other Max in my class has found a great website with questions from THE TEST set up so you can answer them and then see just how far off you still are from grasping all of the concepts, and what things you've already forgotten from the first few weeks of class-- http://exams4pilots.org/ VERY handy! |
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Eyes On The Prize-- |
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Today, Twin Cities Aviation held an open house for anyone interested in Cirrus aircraft or TCA's maintenance facilities, flight school, or their partnership with AirMax Airlines to offer charter service.
Cirrus flew some of their latest and greatest down from Duluth. I'm guessing they flew IFR to get here. |
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Full Motion Flight Training partnered up and brought some folks over to their facility to see the sim
and do a carrier landing. |
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The folks from Cirrus appeared to have some interested parties looking at their new anti-icing technology and the really cool see-in-the-dark camera. |
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So, I just have to grit my teeth, learn the goofy stuff as well as the important things, wait for good weather and then, maybe some day, I'll get to fly one of these babies on my own. |
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• Hi Max, Had the time to visit all 9 of your stories on the fun of learning to fly. Keep up the stories (great photos too) and of course, keep up learning everything needed to master that 'high proformance' trainer you are using. I flew a demo flight back in 2000 in the orginal Cirrus. After just a couple of minutes the side stick became natural feeling. I shot a couple of landings (which went well) and I really liked the aircraft. It's a long way from the 'Air knocker' (Aroncia Champ) I took my first duel, back in 1950. I know you will become a great pilot.
Cheers,
- Bob Leonard
• Hello Max,
First off, congratulation of learning how to fly! It's a lot different than when I started almost 20 years ago with no GPS or glass cockpits or even an intercom for a while. The Cirrus wasn't even a gleam in someone's eye yet.
You didn't mention it in entry #9, but BR (for mist) comes from the French word for mist - brume.
I actually learned this during my first flying job, flying cargo in a Shorts 330 in Maine. We had an NOAA weather observer stationed there (they were eventually replaced by an ASOS) and although they weren't associated with the airport ops, were kind enough to give us current weather when we called in range every morning at 2am. We received a report one morning of 2 miles visibility, and brume. My captain and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and asked for a repeat. 2 miles with brume. "Well ask her what that is" he says. "I'm not gonna ask her, you ask her." After on the third of night of "brume" reports we finally walked over to their little shack on the airfield and asked. "It's brume" she says. "Bruuuume, like a broom?, Brume." "What the heck is brume?" was my reply.
"It's French for mist."
- Nathaniel Perlman |
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