Originally Posted by
Piltdown Man
Last week you said that you had another lesson booked in a week's time. No pressure but time is up: How did it go? If you haven't had the lesson yet, the secret is to trim the thing (use finger tip pressure to sense the load on controls) and make sure that you look out, not in.
Thanks for asking; I think it went a lot better than the previous ones. At least the instructor didn't look green with motion sickness by the end of it. I was able to either fly in a reasonably straight line, or climb and descend, but not both at the same time. That is, whenever I try to climb or descend, I end up facing the wrong direction.
According to my instructor it is typical to be at this point after five hours' flying -- inasmuch as it is possible to judge -- so I'm not beating myself up about not being Biggles right now.
But this doesn't change the fundamental problem, which is that I can't really afford to fly
To get to PPL test-passing standard before the money I have negotiated from the domestic finance committee runs out, I need to make more than `typical' progress. I had hoped to be able to make good any deficiency in natural talent by working harder. But, as other people have pointed out, it doesn't seem to be possible to get better at flying by working harder at it. It seems that the only way to learn is to keep stumping up the hourly fees, and not worry how much it is costing. Ouch.
I doubt I will ever be able to fly more than an hour a month on a
long term basis, given the number of other demands there are on my earnings. And if I try to
learn to fly on an hour a month, well, I'm not sure that is even possible.
So I still have a difficult decision to make: (i) fly as often as I can afford on a long-term basis, and accept that I will probably never get any good, or fly very often, or (ii) fly once or twice a week until my money runs out, whether I get to test-passing standard or (most likely) I don't. Tricky.
I have investigated flying microlights, but my height and weight make that difficult. While I might, with harsh dieting, just squeeze under the maximum seat weight in a C42, I've phoned all the clubs within an hour-or-so's drive of where I live, and none seem very keen on having me as a student (I'm nearly 6'5" tall, and three feet wide at the shoulders). This is fair enough, I guess -- who would want to teach somebody to fly in an aircraft that was loaded to within 20kg or so of MTOW, and only carrying an hour's fuel? So it seems that I'm stuck with flying expensive planes, which compounds the problem
Oh well, that's life.
Thanks to everybody for the advice and support.