Michael’s Flight Training Diary

In the winter, there’s plenty of good weather but the lack of light evenings (and my general unavailability at weekends due girlfriend) make it hard to fit flying in. In the springtime, the evenings quickly get light… but the weather is unflyable 80% of the time.

I’ve flown three times in the last three months. Turbulent, wet, frontal weather has persisted now for two months, and there’s no end in sight. There’s typically one flyable day a week, and without more flexibility in my personal schedule, it’s so hard to regularly take advantage of good weather.

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.