@adhawkins, stevelup: Fame Indeed
- I think you would be surprised how much (positive) effect your writings have. I did make an attempt at a PPL learning blog myself, but failed miserably. It takes time, dedication and perseverance - I used all mine up just learning to fly
@AOB9: I set myself the goal of getting the PPL during 2010. Started in January but poor weather and aircraft tech problems meant little happened until April. Switched to PA28 and booked 2-3 hours every weekend, with the usual cancellations due to weather, aircraft tech, instructor availability. I found that shorter times between lessons helped maintain momentum - I didn't have to relearn much each time. My best (and most enjoyable) progress was a period of 4-5 days in the summer where I flew every day, sometimes twice. Overall it took 9 months from start to finish, 55 hours (including the PPL skills test lasting 2 hours). I soloed at 17:35, so the old story that your total PPL time is about 3x time to go solo was approximately right. I could possibly have done it a few hours less - it took an hour or two to retrain on the PA28, I was keen to take a short lesson when the conditions really weren't suitable and we had a club trip in the summer, but pretty happy about the time. I had originally started out thinking I'd go for NPPL, but after some advice on pprune plus the flying school saying that you still need almost as many hours training regardless, I switched to PPL after going solo.