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Weather permitting, I should have my first solo on Monday! I passed my pre-solo written and oral with the school this week. I was originally scheduled to solo today, but the plane I booked went down for maintenance and no other C172P models (the type I've been flying) were available. I was pissed! But the weather was perfect and we flew for a half-hour of practice landings in a C172SP. The 172SP is fuel-injected and was a shitload more powerful and stable (and pimped out with leather seats, GPS, G1000, etc) than the ones I'd been flying, and I got to pattern altitude well before turning downwind. It was awesome, but it's $30/hour more expensive than the 172P, so back to the P I'll go after today. Cannot wait for Monday and (hopefully) my first solo!
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Sep 15, 2013 00:53
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Hi guys. I've been wanting to get my PPL since I was 15 and a decade later I finally get to start. Has anyone here ever done flight instruction in the Portland, OR area? I contacted and am waiting to hear back from this place but wanted to see if there were other recommendations too. http://www.touch-n-goes.com/
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Sep 15, 2013 01:12
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Captain Apollo posted:This is actually the local pilot owned pilot maker and 'trainer.' I've got 30 hours in it myself! Guy buys it, gets license in it, sells it to next guy. How many hours are on the engine and time since last overhaul? Just be sure you're not actually buying a $31k plane.
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Sep 15, 2013 01:18
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800hrs left on the engine till TBO.....
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Sep 15, 2013 01:52
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... I'll buy it if you won't. :P
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Sep 15, 2013 02:04
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Captain Apollo posted:This is actually the local pilot owned pilot maker and 'trainer.' I've got 30 hours in it myself! Guy buys it, gets license in it, sells it to next guy. How's the paint and cockpit? Beyond that, the price is low because Cherokees 140s are super undesirable as they're the cheapest, lowest-powered low-wing Piper model. For your intended purposes, however, those undesirable characteristics make it about the perfect airplane.
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Sep 15, 2013 03:21
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Paint is chipped around the cowling but is clean elsewhere. Interior has 'nice' cloth seats. Panel is in a 6 pack configuration with a a com box in the floor to do two headsets. It will come with some newish radios that you can switch freqs back and forth. I'm honestly trying to find a reason not to do it because I might end up with the mooney officially this year...... I've been saying for the last 3 years that I'd buy that plane in a heartbeat if anybody was selling it. drat mouth!
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Sep 15, 2013 14:33
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Hello! Canadian study pilot checking in. I just started at Algonquin's pilot program. Any one on here taken this course/route? I get to fly Da-20 Katanas, and on Tuesday is my P-STAR exam, so if anyone has tips, or advice, I'd appreciate it.
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Sep 15, 2013 15:56
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bunnyofdoom posted:Hello! Canadian study pilot checking in. I just started at Algonquin's pilot program. Any one on here taken this course/route? I get to fly Da-20 Katanas, and on Tuesday is my P-STAR exam, so if anyone has tips, or advice, I'd appreciate it. The P-STAR is probably the easiest test you need to write to get your licence. Mine was taken entirely from the practice test bank. Run through the practice questions twice and you'll get 100%. Katanas are really fun to fly.
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Sep 15, 2013 16:42
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Are the Katana's owned by OAS? I flew them for a bit and they are probably some of the most under appreciated planes out there.
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Sep 16, 2013 02:12
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helno posted:Are the Katana's owned by OAS? I flew them for a bit and they are probably some of the most under appreciated planes out there. Yes. I am flying OAS instead of OFC. I've been up in the katana once, and I only got three more sim sessions before I go up again, and my god love those planes.
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Sep 16, 2013 02:15
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The constant speed prop makes that 80 hp engine seem so much more lively than the 108 in the 152. There is one at the airport here that is privately owned and has been basically abandoned for about 5 years now. Pretty sad to see it like that. We have an orthodontist with a DA40. It is lovely to look at but is also worth more than my house so I have mixed feelings.
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Sep 16, 2013 02:23
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helno posted:The constant speed prop makes that 80 hp engine seem so much more lively than the 108 in the 152. That legit makes me angry. Is it wrong I want to sneak onto that airfield, fix it up, and fly it home?
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Sep 16, 2013 02:30
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helno posted:We have an orthodontist with a DA40. It is lovely to look at but is also worth more than my house so I have mixed feelings. Remember, you can always sleep in your airplane but you can never fly your house.
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Sep 16, 2013 13:23
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fordan posted:Remember, you can always sleep in your airplane but you can never fly your house. Hahahaha.
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Sep 16, 2013 16:19
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fordan posted:Remember, you can always sleep in your airplane but you can never fly your house. Is this how regionals are hiring these days?
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Sep 16, 2013 21:19
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hobbesmaster posted:Is this how regionals are hiring these days? You don't sleep in the airplane, you "study the overhead panel." You also don't sleep in the crew room, you just check in early for your assignment so that you can take a 8 hour nap.
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Sep 16, 2013 21:34
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bunnyofdoom posted:That legit makes me angry. Is it wrong I want to sneak onto that airfield, fix it up, and fly it home? The plane itself is probably fine but the engine is covered with birds nests and is probably loaded with corrosion.
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Sep 17, 2013 01:30
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Had my first solo today! 3 full-stop landings and taxi-backs. There were 4 other people doing pattern work at the same time as me, so quite a lot of looking out for traffic and radio chatter in addition to flying the plane. ATC did a good job with it though, and I only had to extend downwind once. Two of the other planes were C150's and slow as hell, so I had to make sure I didn't creep up on them too close when following them. The landings were decent, still need a lot of practice before I can feel super-confident in landing. But I didn't break the plane or myself, so I'm happy! Also I was my instructor's first solo student, so that was pretty cool for him too.
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Sep 17, 2013 03:13
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ProFootballGuy posted:Had my first solo today! 3 full-stop landings and taxi-backs. There were 4 other people doing pattern work at the same time as me, so quite a lot of looking out for traffic and radio chatter in addition to flying the plane. ATC did a good job with it though, and I only had to extend downwind once. Two of the other planes were C150's and slow as hell, so I had to make sure I didn't creep up on them too close when following them. My first solo is in a month man!  Congrats!
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Sep 17, 2013 03:18
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bunnyofdoom posted:My first solo is in a month man! How far are you into training? A month is a long time, it seems like consistent training early on results in exponential gains in skills. A month ago I was nowhere near solo and was struggling hard with ground reference maneuvers.
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Sep 17, 2013 04:06
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ProFootballGuy posted:Good luck! I was chuckling "holy poo poo" to myself as I was taxiing for my first solo takeoff. But after you're in the air, all the poo poo you've learned comes back and you get in the zone. Having the quiet cockpit helped me remember the processes my instructor taught me every time we flew. I started at the start of september. So far, only had one in plane session, rest in simulators. Three more sim sessions then I start flying, then I have 17 hour in cockpit til solo. I'm guessing a month til then. I write my pstar in 2hours. Yikes...
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Sep 17, 2013 15:09
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bunnyofdoom posted:I started at the start of september. So far, only had one in plane session, rest in simulators. Three more sim sessions then I start flying, then I have 17 hour in cockpit til solo. I'm guessing a month til then. I write my pstar in 2hours. Yikes... What kind of program are you doing? I haven't done any sim work.
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Sep 17, 2013 15:47
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ProFootballGuy posted:What kind of program are you doing? I haven't done any sim work. Through Algonquin and Ottawa Aviation Services. They have a sim set-up, and they have us do sim work first, because it's easier to teach with in some ways, then we do in plane with instructor.
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Sep 17, 2013 15:58
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Sim training is very good but for primary training my biggest concern with it is that it gets your eyes inside looking at the instruments when during private pilot they really should be mostly outside 90% of the time. I saw it time and time again with the students that had simmed more. Make sure when you start flying that you really make a focused effort to keep your eyes totally outside the cockpit - see what 20, 30, 45 degrees of bank looks like relative to the horizon. See what the airplane looks like in level flight, a slow climb or slow descent. There can be a lot of traffic out there and it's important when flying VFR to be eyes outside as much as possible.
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Sep 17, 2013 19:40
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Kinda confused about what you'd actually train in a sim for a new student pilot. I could see it for teaching how to do radio navigation, maybe radio calls with the instructor playing ATC, maybe things like spin recovery or emergency procedures, but most of the stuff would be much better learned up in the air. And new pilot should be learning straight & level flight before how to tune in a VOR I'd think. Now Instrument training where the pilot presumably already has their basic airmanship down, isn't supposed to be looking out the window, and the CFII can quickly reset the sim to the start of an approach or can fail instruments more subtly than sticking a cover over it seems a perfect fit for simulators.
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Sep 17, 2013 19:57
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Procedures have some value too, especially if you're using flows. We had our students practice flows and checklists in the sim before they wasted time in the airplane. Especially as non-native english speakers, it was good just having them read through everything and having time to explain why we check each item and what we're looking for instead of trying to do it in a very loud airplane. The airplane is a terrible classroom in that sense, especially in Phoenix where it's hot, the sim can be much better. But overall as far as actual maneuvers go, landings, airspeed control, looking outside etc it does a poor job. I just hate to see it introduced too early, when I went up with my students in the plane I'd cover up the instruments eventually cause with my first group of students I didn't and I caught them looking inside way too much.
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Sep 17, 2013 20:05
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Depends on the simulator in my opinion. The traditional one that is basically a glorified MS flight sim is of little value but things like the redbird ones probably add quite a bit of value. Personally I think everyone should learn to fly gliders prior to flying motorized aircraft. Very basic instruments make for very outside the cockpit pilots. Gets the basic airmanship skills down pat in a relatively inexpensive way.
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Sep 17, 2013 20:14
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jjones posted:Gained my UK NPPL(M) (microlight/ultralight) in December 2012 and bought a Skyranger (Rotax 912): Looks great. Whereabouts are you flying from? I've just returned from a weeks aircraft adventure with a friend in his RV8. England to the south of Germany. Saw some beautiful warbirds and met a couple of their owners. Went for lunch in Locarno (Switzerland) flying down the valleys. Just incredible. The problem is it has started me dreaming about warbird ownership..
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Sep 17, 2013 20:55
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Congrats on the solo! We had a few non motion frasca sims with aircraft specific cockpits. They were great for teaching procedures, especially emergency stuff that you'd never think of doing in the real airplane. It was always fun to see what students would do when bad stuff happened. There were some hilarious highlights: -After starting an engine and noticing there was no oil pressure the student tried to increase oil pressure by adding throttle. There was no rise in oil pressure so he added more throttle. This continued for about 15 seconds until he was running the engine at full power on the ramp with no oil. -I failed the students airspeed indicator on the T/O roll in a 172. The student used up 7,500' of an 8,000' runway before aborting the takeoff. According to the simulator (any physics probably) stopping a 172 from 100+ knots takes more than 500'. -Failed my students alternator 5NM form the airport. Their response: Emergency descent to an off field landing. When I asked him about why he did this his response was "The alternator is really heavy so it'll keep spinning for a few minutes but once it slows down the magnetos won't spark and the engine will die" -I had a student who always forgot to turn on the fuel boost pumps per SOP when coming back in for landing. "ATC" just happened to clear someone to line up and wait when he was on short final. As soon as he throttled up for the go around his left engine driven fuel pump "failed." Since his boost pump wasn't on the engine died shortly thereafter. The student decided that instead of taking the time to troubleshoot he would just feather the engine and land straight ahead over the traffic in position. So far so good, then the stupidity struck hard. After feathering the engine he then noticed that he was holding altitude so he decided to troubleshoot the engine... without bringing it out of feather. Once he determined that the engine couldn't be restarted he secured it by shutting off the mixture and fuel selector. By this point he was on a 6 mile upwind and had gradually risen to 500'. He finally decided it was time to return to the airport. About the time he was abeam the numbers on the departure end of the runway he realized that the engine had been feathered when he tried to troubleshoot it. He brought it out of feather and, surprise, it didn't work (Mixture was never advanced past cutoff). When it didn't restart he said "gently caress this, I'll just fly the drat airplane." He never bothered to re-feather the engine and crashed following a VMC roll in the base/final turn.
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Sep 17, 2013 22:40
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helno posted:The traditional one that is basically a glorified MS flight sim is of little value but things like the redbird ones probably add quite a bit of value. Well, I would describe Redbird's stuff as "glorified MS flight sim"...
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Sep 18, 2013 00:16
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helno posted:Depends on the simulator in my opinion. The traditional one that is basically a glorified MS flight sim is of little value but things like the redbird ones probably add quite a bit of value. Redbird is absolutely glorified MS flight sim, it's very obvious when you're actually using one. I haven't used their motion one, but their non-motion FMX (same sim just doesn't move) is, imo, a gigantic piece of poo poo. Well, supposedly it's ESP or whatever, not actually FS technically, but who knows, there is this crazy crazy article: http://deadredbird.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/more-on-the-bird3.pdf
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Sep 18, 2013 01:28
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While that article is part of the PFC/Redbird holy war that's been equally dirty on both sides, I can definitely confirm that (at least older) Redbirds are running straight up MSFS, not ESP. Redbird also has some other hilarious stuff - for example, the FAA decided that to be a certified AATD, your yoke had to have push to talk. Redbird for awhile made their sims have yokes that had a button that had no wiring to anything, since there was no requirement to make it actually be connected to the sim... Also, the motion cuing on the FMX sucks and has very little training value. The full Level 6-7 (old Level D-ish) motion platforms are the only ones that are not a complete waste of money and actually have some value.
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Sep 18, 2013 03:48
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Honestly, our old Frascas had real G430s that interfaced very nicely with the system and were invaluable for training. When trying to use the G430/530 on what's supposed to be the best redbird sim it's craptucularly emulated and almost totally unusable. PFCs and Frascas seem better than Redbird, to me.
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Sep 18, 2013 04:11
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aunt jemima posted:While that article is part of the PFC/Redbird holy war that's been equally dirty on both sides, I can definitely confirm that (at least older) Redbirds are running straight up MSFS, not ESP. I think the newer ones are running Prepar3d (LockMart bought the license to FSX/ESP and made a few changes), but given how horribly outdated most of the code in FSX and ESP is (it was originally written for WinXP), I don't get why they didn't just go to X-Plane, which is already pretty well established for FTD's and AATD's.
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Sep 18, 2013 06:13
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Have no idea what ESP is, but my old flight school has a redbird non-motion simulator that I swear is running FSX. When we loaded up at the airport I was like hey this looks exactly like it does at home. Why can't I log time I fly at home? I've got a yoke and throttle. As Slaughter said the 430 (as well as all other instruments) was a massive headache. You can't spin the dial too quickly or the computer won't register. Not to mention it doesn't fly anything like a real plane.
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Sep 18, 2013 06:44
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The crosswind redbird trainer I saw at Sun 'n Fun looked pretty cool. No idea how useful it'd be for the huge price I'm sure it commands, but there was definitely a line of pilots waiting to try it out. Edit: video http://youtu.be/Qo6kEcI5uIE fordan fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 18, 2013 14:41
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KodiakRS posted:Helpful Thanks for the insight into what your students would do in failure conditions. I guess at least in the piston singles I'm flying, there's no Vmc to worry about. Good call on preparing for system failures though. If I know I'm a terrible teacher, what are the other options for hour building that isn't CFI? There isn't much business around here for banner towing, really.
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Sep 18, 2013 14:58
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about sims
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Dalrain posted:Thanks for the insight into what your students would do in failure conditions. I guess at least in the piston singles I'm flying, there's no Vmc to worry about. Good call on preparing for system failures though. It's one thing to talk about failures in the classroom, or to practice your basic emergencies in the airplane. But 90% of the time the situation isn't going to be that clear cut. What if the engine is running rough but still producing power? If you're flying along happy as a clam and your low fuel annunciation comes on when you have 3 hours of fuel left what do you do? It's one thing to talk about this with a student in a debrief but it's another to throw a situation at them they've never thought of and force them to think for themselves while still "flying" the sim. Dalrain posted:If I know I'm a terrible teacher, what are the other options for hour building that isn't CFI? There isn't much business around here for banner towing, really. -Flying skydivers -Giving air tours (CA I flew with yesterday did this at the grand canyon to build time) -Air survey/pipeline patrol -If you're sky Romney just pay for the flight time
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Sep 18, 2013 15:21
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| # ? May 15, 2024 16:21 |
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The Slaughter posted:Redbird is absolutely glorified MS flight sim, it's very obvious when you're actually using one. I haven't used their motion one, but their non-motion FMX (same sim just doesn't move) is, imo, a gigantic piece of poo poo. Well, supposedly it's ESP or whatever, not actually FS technically, but who knows, there is this crazy crazy article: http://deadredbird.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/more-on-the-bird3.pdf That article is out of date and full of bullshit. Most of the complaints in there are false, and the few genuine ones have been fixed by this point. Yes, the Redbirds run on a modified MS program, but it's a custom version that's being updated an modified to remove the issues that the normal version has. The motion platforms are actually extremely well-made, and add a lot to the experience. These articles say it better than I can. A Shitty Reporter fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 18, 2013 15:54
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