Google Earth – what can I say? Wow. If you have a PC, a broadband connection and you haven’t tried it yet, pop over to http://earth.google.com and take it for a spin. One very nice feature for pilots is the ability to directly load data from your Garmin or Magellan GPS into Google Earth for review in full 3D glory, you can even share them with other people…
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In my travels around the web looking for resources and information for the main PrepareToTest site, I’m continually coming across sites provided by the FAA for pilot and AMT education. One of the most important areas of education is Safety and the FAA Safety Program is a site devoted entirely to this topic. In reading the site, a formula listed on the AMT Awards page, “Knowledge + Professionalism = Safety” stuck in my mind as being a great way to sum up the approach we should all have towards aviation and the many related safety aspects of the profession. There is a variety of useful information and resources on the site that all Pilots and AMTs should be aware of, I describe some of these in the rest of this blog entry.
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One of the side benefits of aviation is a greater interest in the weather. Coming from England, the weather is always a topic for discussion but as a pilot this becomes increasingly important. Watching the weather in the days leading up to a flight is key to seeing how things are developing but if you’re like many of us, you don’t fly as much as you would like and so you don’t get as much practice watching the weather as you might like. To keep my hand in at interpreting the typical aviation charts and to build up some more experience relating the weather systems to the weather they create, I’ve set up my computer’s desktop wallpaper to show some of the charts that I find give me a good feel for what is going on.
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Whilst searching around for weather-related websites I came across Henry Robinson’s online book entitled “The Winds of Flight”. Mr Robinson developed this e-book from his experiences teaching meteorology to pilots and his desire to spread his knowledge of his field to as many people as possible. Its written in a very readable style based on real world examples rather that the traditional theoretical approach found in other texts.
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Whilst at Airventure last week I sat in on a presentation by John Moore from the National Aeronautical Charting Office (NACO) who talked about some interesting and little known facts about the various VFR charts we use. He showed some statistics about the frequency of changes to the various charts which certainly brought home the logic of flying with current versions. In addition he reviewed some new features on the charts that make life easier and showed an example of how misreading the chart symbols can be costly…
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I just returned from a couple of excellent days at Oshkosh having got my annual full-immersion aviation fix. There were a great deal of interesting things to see this year, ranging from celebrity spotting (Harrison Ford drew the most attention from my wife…) to the real stars of the show – the aircraft, with everything from light sport aircraft to personal jets to the worlds first privately built spacecraft on display.
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From looking at the areas people select to practice on PrepareToTest, rules and regulations get the most attention. Whilst its perhaps not as ‘exciting’ as learning about navigation or how the aircraft systems work, learning and understanding the various FAA regulations is a critical part of passing the knowledge tests and more importantly, being safe in the air. A question from yesterday’s Sport Pilot quiz highlighted one of topics that isn’t difficult but requires a bit of memorization to make it stick – weather minimums in different classes of airspace.
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The Milwaukee AirExpo rolled into town today – the headline act was the Blue Angels so needless to say I stopped by the lakefront to take a look. It was very hot in downtown Milwaukee this afternoon and the airshow was a lot busier than last year’s event – the Blue Angels Im sure had something to do with this. I had the video camera and the digital camera along to record the event but the camera had some issues so all I have at the moment are some still frames from the video.
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Thunderstorms are a fact of life during the summer months and whilst the various FAA knowledge tests provide a theoretical background to thunderstorms, how and why they form (remember you need moisture, an unstable atmosphere and a lifting action) and best course of action to deal with them (avoid by at least 20 miles), they can’t cover more real life situations. The AOPA Air Safety Foundation (ASF) has just released an online minicourse called “Avoiding Thunderstorms” discussing radar services that can help and how best to work with Air Traffic Control (ATC) when dealing with convective activity. They use real ATC recordings of a pilot miscommunicating with ATC and go on to describe effective ways to work with the system to avoid such situations. ATC is a vital partner in dealing with weather aloft so its well worth knowing more about how they can help should you need to call on them.

The ASF has a number of other online courses that are also well worth investigating, covering topics such as Mountain Flying, Airspace, Runway incursions, ATC and IFR operations.

Technorati Tags: flying, weather

We’ve been running the 10 question daily quizzes on PrepareToTest for the various exams and as part of this we track the overall performance on each question – how many times it was attempted, how many times it was answered correctly, which answers were selected, etc. By looking at the scores its very obvious when people are having problems with a particular question or topic. Based on this Im going to periodically write up an explanation for particularly troublesome questions. Today’s Private Pilot quiz had a good example related to Convective Sigmets.
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