Michael’s Flight Training Diary

48/50 - 96%

A week of not-quite-a-holiday gave me the perfect opportunity to rip through the material for the next exam. There’s a lot of it for this subject, but almost all of it is very simple - only a few points about gyroscopes and compasses gave me serious food for thought, although a lot of the content is interesting and valuable. Once again, my errors demonstrate simple human fallibility: what is the orientation of the rotating wheel of the gyroscope inside an artificial horizon? Easy, I say: it indicates pitch, so it rotates in the vertical plane with a horizontal axis.

Well, it comes back marked wrong, and I’m confused. Even the examiner is confused too… until I finally twig. It’s not asking about the rotation of the AH indicator (and gyroscope) relative to the aircraft - it’s asking about the rotation of the rotor of the gyroscope. Which is rigid with respect to the surface of the earth, and therefore rotates horizontally around a vertical axis.

29/30 - 97%

I’m starting to get into a methodology with these exams which is strangely reminiscent of my university days. Take time to read the book through for interest (which I did many months ago, when I first got the series). Then when I need to prepare for the exam, read it again, making sure I understand every point, and doing all the end-of-chapter questions. Then, launch into the past papers, saving the last of the three for just before the exam. Hey presto… it’s all gone in, and I get near 100%. The content is almost entirely very straightforward, it just needs to be committed to memory, and subjected to a modicum of logical thought.

So where did I go wrong in this exam, from this lofty notion of academic perfection? Apparently, I thought that a gradient wind carries air from an area of high pressure to an adjacent area of high pressure. That was dumb: I read the word “low” instead of the second “high”. Bizarre, but maybe it’s a useful case from the Human Factors syllabus in point.

30/30 - 100%

A bit less of a delay on this one, passing it on 19th February. Pretty straightforward, but attention to detail in the revision made all the difference between 85% and 100%. Both are pass marks though, so arguably there wasn’t any point other than the maintenance of my ego! Not much else to say, really. It’s not a difficult subject. It also doesn’t have much bearing on the linguistic skill of actually using the radio - which is a much trickier business, as I’m woefully reminded every time I attempt to communicate with Brize Radar…

Pass: 100% (20/20)

After I did the last exam, I said “let’s see if I can do Human Performance in the next month”! Well, in a spectacularly poor piece of human performance, I’ve finally got round to it almost exactly six months later, when my lesson was cancelled due weather last week! It actually turned out to be very easy - I completed it in under ten minutes, and spent another five checking it. The exam followed exactly the format of the mocks in Jeremy Pratt’s book, and all the complicated stuff I thought I’d have to recall (Time of Useful Consciousness at different altitudes, survival strategies, etc.) appears not to be in the exam syllabus. Result.

Next up - Communications. Let’s see how long it’s going to take me to do that. I really should try and do it in the next month, because at my current rate I’ll be finishing the flying syllabus in about three months’ time, and there are four exams still to go.

The Jeremy Pratt PPL theory books, published under the AFE brand, are fairly good. They seem comprehensive, and they’re very accessible. I passed the Air Law exam comfortably, so they’re doing something right. Now I’ve just finished reading his Human Factors and Flight Safety book.

But he sometimes says some stupid and anachronistic things, like his comparison of the relative merits of alcohol and illegal drugs: apparently, boozing it up is harmless if you allow it to clear from the body before flying, but if you have a few puffs on a spliff or do a little bit of speed one day, it goes without saying that you’ll never, ever be safe to fly an aeroplane again, because unlike alcohol, they have long-term and irreversible effects. Apparently. I’m certainly not advocating their use… but I do have a penchant for factual rectitude.

And his little foray into statistics at the beginning of the Flight Safety section is a brilliantly ironic illustration of his title of for the chapter, which is “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics”. He presents an obviously daft mis-interpretation of a statistic, to illustrate his point that “to get the best out of any statistical study, it is necessary to approach the subject with a fair dose of common sense.” Well, I claim that it is necessary to approach the subject with informed logical thinking, rather than common sense. His “common sense” analysis then presents the laughably fallacious conclusion that “statistically, a pen top or a sock is far more dangerous than an aircraft in flight”, because more people were injured by them in one year than by aircraft! He fails to consider that only a miniscule proportion of the population encounter light aircraft, and then only for a small amount of time on average, whereas almost everyone encounters pen-tops and socks almost every single day.

(Aside: A sensible comparison would be the number of current pilot’s license holders killed or injured by pen tops or socks, compared with the number of aviation fatalities and injuries. If we conservatively assume that the 30,000 UK pilots (1/2000 of the population) are as likely to be victims of pen tops (140/year in the UK) or socks (60/year) as anyone else, we get an average of 0.1 pilot victims a year… but 18 pilots a year die in aviation accidents, roughly 1 in 2000 pilots. This compares with about 1 in 20000 people being killed on the roads each year, so flying light aircraft appears more dangerous than regularly being in a car.)

Mr. Pratt occasionally gives a sense of “common sense says this, so it must be worth heeding” - which is wrong (and inconsistent with much of the good advice he gives elsewhere), and is a fallacy that may lead to the death of aviators. There is no valid substitute for evidence-based facts and rational thinking, and intuition may be wrong at any time.

<dismounts hobby horse>

Pass: 88% (35/40)

The folks at PFT have been heavily dropping the “s”-word since my latest and much-improved lesson in the circuit. So I figured that it would be a good idea to finally getting around to sitting the Air Law exam, on the presumption that I need to pass it before going solo - although nobody at PFT mentioned it, and since it’s not a legal requirement but generally a club-driven one, maybe they don’t care. I was ready for it when I went out to Fly-in-Spain nearly a month ago, having done all three of the mock papers in Jeremy Pratt’s Question and Answer Simplifier book. I slightly rashly decided to go for the exam at about an hour’s notice when my lesson was cancelled this afternoon, so I dashed home from the office, crammed the subject summary from the Q&A book for twenty minutes, then went to the airport for Judgement.

Didn’t do as well as I’d hoped: got 37 and 39 in the last two mocks, and a couple of the questions seemed to be unfamiliar material to me. But, never mind. I passed with a comfortable margin.

Next up - Human Performance. Got half-way through the book section, and it seems pretty straightforward though there are some tables of numbers to memorise. Let’s see if I can get it done in the next month.

I went and got AFE’s PPL Study Pack a couple of weeks ago, which contains the Jeremy Pratt set of textbooks. Enamoured with the novelty of it all, I dove straight in and started studying the Air Law section, since that’s the prerequisite to solo. Four days and about 8 hours of studying later, I did a did a mock paper from the “Question and Answer Simplifier” book - and got 85% (the pass of 75%). This really is not difficult. It’s not trivial: it needs a bit of work and as with many things in flying, a cavalier attitude might lead to surprising disappointment. But it’s not particularly challenging.

Since then, I’ve worked through the sections on Communications, Meteorology, and I’m just about to finish Navigation. It is all very interesting, and Jeremy Pratt’s style is engaging and accessible - but the novelty is wearing off and I need to make more effort now. Perhaps I should do some more of the mock papers to focus my mind.

I’m also considering getting OAT Media’s CD-ROMs on Communications. For most of the theory material, the multimedia learning material seems to be a superfluous waste of money, when the books are so good: but learning RT is essentially learning a foreign language, so having audio would seem to help. I also bought a little airband receiver to listen and get acquainted with this new language - but even with an extended aerial, the reception at home from the various frequencies at Kidlington and Brize is usually unreadable. Maybe I should spend some time at the airport listening-in.