A1Skinner wrote:Hey Al, if you make it up this way at all this summer let me know. I'll take you up for some 180 time.

Thanks David! it is only a 14 hour drive so don't be surprised when I take you up on it.

If the stars align, maybe I'll pick up your buddy's 180 while I'm in the neighbourhood;-)

Good advice given to date. In the words of the inimitable Yogi: "You don't know what you don't know."

There is a LOT of material that you need to digest for your private pilot certificate. At the University program where I taught, the Private ground school was a full semester program, and it was hard fitting everything in that time frame that really needed to be covered.

You need to learn EVERYthing you can about weather......which of course includes things like Density Altitude, which leads one directly into aircraft performance, which leads into the aircraft flight manual or POH, or whatever data you have for that airplane.

Which leads to aircraft systems....what do you feed that engine? What types of lubricants, how much, etc? Radios, how do they work, who do you talk to, and when, etc.

Airspace is HUGE. The quickest way to lose that freshly minted Private certificate is to violate a protected airspace without clearance......learn airspace till you're sick of it, then study it some more.

Regulations.....how are you going to stay out of trouble if you don't know what the rules are?

Navigation: Bear in mind that as a private pilot, you are licensed to fly a wide variety of aircraft, with a wide variety of avionics, variable from none, as in my airplane, up to and including some of the most sophisticated avionics in the world. What if you get in an airplane that doesn't have a GPS, but it does have a VOR? Guess how you're going to navigate. Same goes for an ADF. If it's in the plane when you take your checkride, you'll be expected to know how to use it. If it's NOT in the plane during the checkride, rest assured that you will still be tested on it.

And, so forth. Get some good study materials, and study it all.

We don't really need any pilots who like to cut corners.

No offense intended by that comment, by the way.

MTV

My 2c: Everything is relevant to some extent, and we're all students, just at different experience levels.

Like you were told, you don't know what you don't know, and there's a whole lot to know. I've been flying for 42 1/2 years, and I'm still learning. When I stop learning, I'll stop flying. Literally every time I go up with an instructor, I learn something, either something new or a way to do something in a different way from the way I'd been doing it.

There are guys on this site who've been flying for a whole lot fewer years than I have but who are much better pilots in some ways. I wouldn't trust me in a 180 with fat tires; but some of those who are great with TWs can't fly in the clouds or the ATC system, and I can.

As good as I am at navigating by reading charts and matching them to the terrain (pilotage), I discovered that some elements of chart reading was actually a weak point when I took my seaplane checkride last summer. What? Seaplanes and chart reading go together? Yup--it's not all stick and rudder.

GPSs are nice, but I can still shoot a pretty accurate NDB approach (if I can find one to use!), and there are enough NDBs still working throughout the Midwest that it's possible to navigate with them from Colorado to Indiana, maybe farther, by combining them with ded reckoning--which I'm pretty good at doing, too. I can find where I am with a single VOR by triangulating. But many people make the mistake of thinking that because they've got a nice GPS, that's all they need--yet it can be interfered with, and in fact all this past Fall, a good chunk of the southwest US had inaccurate and compromised GPS signals due to USAF testing, so that other navigational skills were necessary.

I can read the weather very well--but some of the nuances I thought I knew pretty well, I'm finding that newer methods have made some of what I "knew" less accurate--there's much more to learn, because there's been an amazing amount of weather research done in the last 40 years.

I guess I could go on and on, but you get the point--there's a lot to learn, and you can't begin to know what is relevant vs. what is irrelevant--and in reality that's because it's all relevant to some degree. Be an intellectual sponge; it'll serve you well.

Cary