Student Pilot - share the love
Thread Starter
Join Date: Sep 2018
Location: Bristol
Posts: 31
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Student Pilot - share the love
Hi All
Its almost a year since my last post...at which point I was learning to glide and looking for a way to get into powered. So, I thought I'd just reach out to anyone else who is learning and see how it's all going.
For me, I have stopped gliding to focus entirely on powered. I am working towards my NPPL (M) from a lovely little airfield near Trowbridge, South West UK. I have 20 hours in a horrible to fly AX2000 with a great instructor. I have just about worked through the syllabus and am now circuit bashing in the hope that I go solo before too long. It's taken a while to get to this point, partly due to weather, my age (53) and work commitments etc. I am really keen to get my GST out of the way before the end of the year. I've met up with a nice chap here in the SW and we plan to fly his little plane before we upgrade to a Skyranger or something similar.
Last night, I managed to fail my Air Law exam at first sitting. Partly due to me not reading the question properly, and partly uie to pretty arcane questions!
So, any stoodents out there do share where you are at with your flying.....it really helps to read others experiences.
Cheers
Steve
Its almost a year since my last post...at which point I was learning to glide and looking for a way to get into powered. So, I thought I'd just reach out to anyone else who is learning and see how it's all going.
For me, I have stopped gliding to focus entirely on powered. I am working towards my NPPL (M) from a lovely little airfield near Trowbridge, South West UK. I have 20 hours in a horrible to fly AX2000 with a great instructor. I have just about worked through the syllabus and am now circuit bashing in the hope that I go solo before too long. It's taken a while to get to this point, partly due to weather, my age (53) and work commitments etc. I am really keen to get my GST out of the way before the end of the year. I've met up with a nice chap here in the SW and we plan to fly his little plane before we upgrade to a Skyranger or something similar.
Last night, I managed to fail my Air Law exam at first sitting. Partly due to me not reading the question properly, and partly uie to pretty arcane questions!
So, any stoodents out there do share where you are at with your flying.....it really helps to read others experiences.
Cheers
Steve
Good work on the flying and trying to keep a positive attitude. Yes, the course is a bit of a marathon, not a sprint, with lots of curved balls to dodge on the way, as you will already have found the first few of many!
Regarding the air law specifically, without wishing to appear argumentative; you don't fail an exam for 1 wrong question. Yes, air law is a bit of a test, with some odd wording, and it is probably designed to test your knowledge of detail, as well as to test your patience and application. It is too long ago since I taught and examined PPL air law, however I can assure you the 14 ATPL written exams are orders of magnitude more arcane, odd, pedantic, ambiguous (and sometimes downright wrong!) than PPL air law. So the moral is - knuckle down, see where you went wrong, learn from the mistakes, learn the examiner's ways, and make sure you ace the rest.
All of flying is a test, and the potential consequence of failure don't come much higher than in flying, so it needs you to pay attention to the detail and to get it right. See this as a positive learning experience to set you up for greater things. After all, if it was easy, licences would be handed out with the junk mail, for no effort, and everybody would be doing it!
Stick at it - you'll get there. Take the lows as well as the highs in your stride to ease the path for yourself.
HI GS,
If it helps, Air law also gave me the biggest problem. It is the only one I failed - I passed the other 7 in one sitting. That gave me 10 days to bone-up on just air law for the resit and I still just scraped by. I felt I knew it very well, but there were 15 questions that had me totally stumped; I made a note of them and even after much reading and googling I cannot be sure of the answer to most. However, I knew the other 25 and thanks to some inspired guessing on those 15, I scored exactly 70%! I do find air-law hard because for all the others, as long as you understand a few basic principals you can work-out the answers. Air-law seems to me to be a random collection of not very interesting facts.
If it helps, Air law also gave me the biggest problem. It is the only one I failed - I passed the other 7 in one sitting. That gave me 10 days to bone-up on just air law for the resit and I still just scraped by. I felt I knew it very well, but there were 15 questions that had me totally stumped; I made a note of them and even after much reading and googling I cannot be sure of the answer to most. However, I knew the other 25 and thanks to some inspired guessing on those 15, I scored exactly 70%! I do find air-law hard because for all the others, as long as you understand a few basic principals you can work-out the answers. Air-law seems to me to be a random collection of not very interesting facts.
Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: Cheltenham, UK
Posts: 136
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Steve,
Check out Ben Atkinson on YouTube. He's videoing his journey to NPPL on the Skyranger with David Young at Kemble Flying Club, not a million miles away from you. I started training there too on the Eurostar but that's on hold currently.
Check out Ben Atkinson on YouTube. He's videoing his journey to NPPL on the Skyranger with David Young at Kemble Flying Club, not a million miles away from you. I started training there too on the Eurostar but that's on hold currently.
