Ok - a few questions to answer:
Norther Highflyer - a quick check of my logbook shows that, between Sunday 9th and Sunday 16th inclusive, I flew just under 18 hours. I'm flying for roughly 3 hours a day, generally in two blocks of around 1.5 hours, but obviously flew a little less for the first two days because of weather. And no, this a single-engine CPL. The training is in C172 and PA28R, and the test will be in a PA28R.
Fonawah - exactly as Evo describes it!
Jnp - no, the figures on the website are not realistic. As with just about all figures, they are an absolute minimum assuming you get through in minimum time. But if you come to EFT having not flown here before, then you will need to do a pre-CPL, which is what I did for the first few days. Even if you're a perfect pilot, you'll still need an hour or two to get up to speed with the local procedures, reporting points, airfield layout, nearby features and so on. Remember, at the end of the skills test you can expect your examiner to vector you around and then ask you to take him home - so you'd better know the area! And of course none of us are perfect pilots - I was reasonably current when I came here, but still took a few hours to get up to speed before I started the course, but the less current you are the longer your pre-CPL will take. And once you do start, there's still no guarantee that you'll get through in minimum time.
Accommodation - I'm staying in a hotel in Vero Beach. I decided not to stay at the accommodation the school provides, for several reasons. I heard a few bad things about their accommodation - although they have since moved their housing to a completely different location so everything I heard is, apparently, invalid now. Also, I didn't want to be tied to the school any more than necessary, and I like to be able to get away at the end of the day. If you're looking to save money, then stay at the school's accommodation, and ask them to find you someone to room-share with. I don't know the exact costs, but I think it would work out at around $20/night. Maybe $30 a night including food if you can live cheaply. Those are just guesses, though.
And your final question - I'm just doing the CPL. I only have 3 weeks off work, and to do the CPL in this time is pretty tight anyway.
Keygrip - the way I entertained myself on my day off was to get out of Vero Beach!!! Answer your phone some time, and try not to e-mail me at the account I told you I wouldn't be reading regularly while I'm here, and I might just tell you more about it
<<edit: not a very thorough answer. Beer? Friday, maybe!!(keygrip)>>
On to today's entry:
Day 9 - Tuesday 18 November
Today, for the first time, I failed a portion of an exercise.
The morning's flight went pretty well. The aim of the flight was to cover nav-aid tracking - tracking to and from VORs and NDBs. This was all done under the foggles, and once again, it shouldn't be a problem for anyone with an IMC rating. I was quite happy finding my radial from a specified VOR, then tracking to and from the VOR (careful - if you've just found a radial, then you're asked to track to the VOR, you'll probably want to twist the OBS through 180 degrees!). Homing on an NDB is no problem, and although I had to think a little about tracking a QDM or QDR to/from the NDB, it didn't take too long to remember how to do it from my IMC training.
Once we'd done all that, I took the foggles off and began flying back to base. That's when my instructor pulled the throttle on me. I was very slow to react, but got slowed to 65kts whilst establishing that there was a fire that went out when I shut the engine down, and when I began looking for a field I noticed the private strip that was conveniently positioned on my left - coincidentally (if you believe in coincidence!) the same field that I've had an engine failure near to twice recently! I was at 2500', on a wide downwind - higher than I'd normally be on downwind, but being wide would compensate for that, so I decided to fly a wide circuit from my current position. This was a mistake. Flying a larger circuit makes it very difficult to judge where you're going to land, and I ended up slightly short of the field. This was probably because of the wind, which had a long time on my wide downwind to push me away from the field, and then a long time on final to keep pushing me away from the field. Lesson learnt - next time, in a similar situation, do S-turns to get to a normal PFL-downwind position at 1500'.
The syllabus includes another session of nav-aid tracking, but my instructor feels that this isn't necessary. This gives us an extra flight to work on whatever we feel needs working on instead, so I was pretty happy with that.
Over lunch, I planned the navigation exercise for the afternoon. Just like the CPL skills test, this was to be a single VFR leg, followed by a diversion into IMC, and this time I was allowed to plan a wind correction.
Things started going wrong at the 1/4 way point, which was right next to a small lake. The lake I'd picked turned out to be one of those that's invisible from the air, but I incorrectly singled out a different lake. Once I figured out that it was the wrong lake (the roads near it weren't going the right way) I became fixated with the chart, trying to figure out where I was. My lookout suffered, and my instructor told me that I was steering a very constant heading 3 degrees to the left of what I'd planned, although I wasn't aware of that. The half-way point wasn't near any good landmarks - I knew that before I'd started. So the half-way point came and went, and I still had not had a single good fix on my position. I was confident I was on track at this point, because I could clearly see the large lake near my 3/4 point in the distance, but I didn't know if I was on time or not. I continued flying 3 degrees to the left of my planned heading (it just happened that the wind, from the left, was stronger than forecast so the incorrect heading I was flying was working well), and found my destination easilly in the end, but it wasn't the most confident navigation leg ever.
Then I was diverted to a mast which my instructor "wanted to photograph", and quickly went into IMC. I was in the same aircraft that I'd used before for navigation - the one with no DME - so again I was doing VOR/VOR fixes. This time, I was trying to break everything down so as to not loose concentration on my flying - and the flying, although not perfect, wasn't too bad (except that I kept applying left aileron every time I looked down at the chart - must remember to take hands off the controls completely in future!) Unfortunately, the navigation wasn't working at all. The first fix turned out to be well off track. I looked for the problem, but couldn't see anything wrong, so I tried again for another fix. At around that time, I got a warning flag on one of the VORs. I selected another VOR, tuned and idented it, and then started over again getting a fix. By now, my chart was a mess of radials and tracks, and I was getting stressed. I didn't manage to get a single position fix. On one occassion, I read a radial of 205 off the OBS when it was actually reading 215 - carelessness which I can only put down to being busy and stressed. Eventually, my instructor took over the flying to let me concentrate on the navigation, and I got a good fix, on track but slightly past the destination. While I was busy getting worried about fixing our position, I had paid no attention to the clock, and hadn't noticed that I should have arrived two minutes earlier.
It's obvious that I can fly an aeroplane accurately, in VMC and IMC. It's also obvious that I can get a VOR/VOR fix, and plot it on the chart. What I can't do is do both at once. I couldn't complain when my instructor said that we'd need to spend some extra time on this. I think we've just found what to do instead of nav-aid tracking.
There were a couple of other points mentioned during the de-brief. One was the lack of a gross-error check. The location of Fort Pierce, right next to the coast, makes gross error checks very easy - the coast will be on your left if you're going south, on your right if you're going north, and behind you if you're going west! It's one of those things that you do subconciously when you set heading - you will immediately realise if the coast is the wrong side of you. But I have to remember to say that out loud - and also add extra features like the location of large roads, towns, etc. Likewise, on the diversion, I need a gross error check when I set my heading, and I need to tell the instructor/examiner about it.
We also talked about the VFR leg. The main point to come from this was that I must not
seem to be unsure of what I'm doing. We all know that we don't need to be 100% sure of our exact location at every point along the flight. We all know that sometimes features don't appear when you expect them to, and that some areas don't have any good features to navigate by. But what you don't want to do is tell your (presumably non-pilot, fare-paying) passenger that "I'm not quite sure where we are, but I think we're around the 1/2-way point." Much better to just stay quiet and keep flying the correct heading. When you do get a fix, you can update your ETA and heading, but until that point, there's no need to say anything - and no need to worry about it and stare at the chart either.
My instructor thinks that my VFR navigation will be fine after doing the remainder of the planned navigation exercises, and I think he's probably right. Today I made the mistake of thinking that I have to get a fix at each of my way-points, but as I get to use this method of navigation more and more I'll make fewer and fewer of these mistakes until eventually I don't make any of them any more.
The IFR stuff, on the other hand, I'm not quite sure what to do about. The plan for tomorrow morning is to put the foggles on, and then my instructor will tell me to fly heading XXX for YY minutes, and I'll get nav-aid fixes along the way. Hopefully it will come with more practice. I'm also going to try using finer markers to plot the radials, so my chart doesn't become too difficult to read under all the lines. That, of course, is weather-permitting, because there are storms forecast for tomorrow.
FFF
------------------