TD-5
Entry posted by Riddller
1,366 views
Crap!! I didn't get to fly today. The weather was fine for the morning, but by the time the afternoon flights were supposed to take off, the storms had rolled in. Oh well, I was rescheduled for tomorrow at 0930. Cross your fingers!!
We had CRM and ORM classes when we weren't flying (an hour and a half total), the rest of the time was spent studying in the flight room or listening to other people's briefs or debriefs (they encourage that). There's also a radio in the room that you can use to listen to ground or tower or whatever to learn the radio calls. We're NOT technically on formal-release right now (which would mean 12 hour mandatory days). This means you can be studying, working out, chair-flying, etc... while you're not flying. Anywhere but in your room chilling out. If you keep the flight room clean and don't abuse the free reign the give you (nobody realy checks where you are if you're not in the flight room), then they don't see any reason to put you on formal release.
Some are flying for the second time tommorrow, and others haven't even made it on the schedule. They have their methods for scheduling this stuff, don't bother them with questions. They told us the first week or so of flying is pretty slow (one flight a day, maybe) but pretty soon, many people will be flying twice or (rarely) three times a day.
Mandotory PT was canceled today because it was raining, and the roof of their zillion-dollar facility leaks in the Gym like a sieve, literally!!! It was pouring in there!! Oh well, we worked out on our own. A bunch of people played dodgeball.
We have our first academic test tomorrow. Mr. Siple (Uncle Siple 
), the academics instructor, gives a pretty thorough review before the test I guess. Plus, after every testable lesson, he gives us a set of 10-20 exercise questions, all multiple choice. ALL of the test questions (50 of them) are pulled from those exercises. So we all just studied that tonight.
So I guess a total of 5 from the previous class of 20 or so either quit or were washed-out. That's a 25% (or so) rate!!!
I haven't seen that it's that difficult so far, as long as you want it. Certainly less study time than I put in getting my engineering degree. I would have to say that ANY ground school or flying experience you can get at an FBO before coming here will DEFINITELY pay dividends. Cheapest would be to get any book designed for a person working on their PPL, like I said before, but most flight instructors will charge $30 an hour for ground school if you can't afford $100 an hour for flying. The instructors here are good, and they care about you making it through, but most of them have many thousands of hours and have forgotten what it was like to be a brand-new pilot. As a result, they use terminology during the classes that they think a second-grader knows, but are really understandable only by people with at least some ground school or flight experience.
If you don't understand a term, stop them and ask what it is!!! Chances are, 75% of the class was wondering the same thing, but was too afraid to ask!!!
Any questions, feel free to post...
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