Tinworm-wings

Thursday, 26 February 2009

Kind and helpful advice

I have been on the BMAA forum and people have given kind and helpful advice. One in particular pointed out the irony that now that I have taken the exam, I am very well placed to know what to expect with the retake, which puts me in a stronger position than virgin candidates.

As well as being given one or two good book references and some very sound exams skills advice on the forum, I have received emails from one pilot, which have been very helpful indeed.

I am touched by everyone's kindness and understanding.

Monday, 23 February 2009

I failed!

The taller they are, the harder they fall - and pride comes before a fall provide the basis of a mixed metaphor which I can work on when I am not rushing to get ready for school, but there is nothing more humbling, barring crashing on your first solo, which one consoling voice soothed my anguish with today, than getting 87.5% on Mock and 45 on the real thing. I failed miserably.

But once I got it all in perspective, I realised that I feel more angry than disappointed because nothing in my mock prepared me for the format of the exam, about which more tomorrow. I did make some very silly mistakes....but I put those down to the panic and stress caused by being presented with two tasks which were not on any of the 4 mocks I did: analysing a document and doing a full plan BEFORE answering the questions about teh route. In the mocks, the process unfolds bit by bit, so that one piece of information informs another....and you know you are building it up logically, but when you have to plan it all in advance, you don't spot any errors and the errors are compounded.

Realising this put me in a spin, so that in no time at all I made a fundamental error through stress alone, which affected my over-all journey length, airtime, groundspeed, fuel burn etc!!

So, even though the examiner said my manipulation of formulae, 1-in-60 rule, triangles and route planning were all fine, I still dropped umpteen marks. Jeeeezus!

Depressed and angry now. Not a good end to the half term.

On the plus side, I did fly (solo) and did manage to land right on the numbers three times in a row.

Friday, 20 February 2009

Like I always tell my pupils, read the question CAREFULLY!

I have just been analysing my mistakes and realised that I broke one of my cardinal rules, one I always bang on about when prepping pupils for their SATs - always read the question carefully!

I measured the distance between two plots and got 77 and selected 77 from the multiple choice, but hadn't noticed that the answer was in statute miles, not nautical miles. The nautical mile option was way off, so I can see why my eye went straight to the 77. What I should have done was convert the 77 nm into kilometres, which is 142.5!

Now I reckon that question is a bit cheeky and I can almost see the Machiavellian grin on the setter's face, but I reckon whoever he is has taught me a valuable lesson: check your units carefully!

Mock result

Really annoyed with myself for getting 4 out of 32 wrong = 87.5% right. Can't wait for Neill to tell me what I got wrong, but he tells me that the real test is one and a half hours long and has 20 questions, whereas I did my 32 questions in half that time. Apparently I got a couple of my mistakes in my first 20, so if I have twice as long as I took and fewer questions, there really should be no reason why I shouldn't get 100%. 70% is pass mark, so I am encouraged, anyway.

Update:

Just talked to Neill. My mistakes were of the general knowledge variety and one conversion error, so nothing to worry about. Glad my plots, triangles and 1-in-60 rules calculations were all sound, anyway.

I am taking the exam on Monday and Neill thinks we may get to fly my first revision hours too, as Sywell is now allowing flying again. Some wind is forecast, but nothing too worrying. Can't wait!

Mock Exam done

Well, it is 5 a.m. and I have just emailed my answers to Neill, and I feel pretty confident. It was great fun and unlike exams I have done in the past, where I felt I had to just blag my way and hope for the best, I went into this confidently and enjoyed the challenge. My Dotty Dog rule stood me in good stead and my triangles of velocities held up, though I did have a minor panic about measuring A-X2 for Ground speed, but it came back to me just in time.

Really the only thing that taxed me was plotting on a 1:500,000 chart, as I had concentrated most revision on the 1:250,000 chart, which is easier to read, especially as the Transverse Mercator projection means that you can slide two rules at right angles to get a plot, which you can't do with a curved line of latitude.

Anyway, can't wait for my results! If I have done as well as I think, I am ready to take the exam and might as well go to Sywell to take it, whether it is flyable this weekend or not.

This all goes to prove that the best way to learn something is to try to teach it to someone else - and it also proves the benefit of visual mnemonics.

Thursday, 19 February 2009

The End is Nigh

Great. Not only does this work, now, but I actually like it better!

click images to enlarge

Since I first posted this, one or two have said it is too much to remember, but it may help some people and at least producing it has crystallised the idea in my own mind. They say the best way to learn something is to try to explain it to someone else.

.

just had a @G!^*! moment

*******! - this was going to be a superb mnemonic...but I just realised that my sofa was misremembered. So....

For god's sake do not memorise this.

IT WAS a great inspiration. I needed a way of remembering the rest of my Dotty Dog formula. This pictorial mnemonic. Dotty dog x A-Z over sofa
where Dotty Dog is Distance off track x 60 over Distance gone

A-Z is Total Track (all the way from A-Z) Sofa is Distance gone SoFar

SOFAr is the big mistake.....because it is not so far, but distance TO GO

(I shouldn't really publish this, but seems a shame to waste the effort! Blame me when future students all get this question wrong!

I can keep the dog and the A-Z but I need to replace the sofa with a means of recalling DISTANCE TO GO. I suppose I could move the sofa and have my dotty dog sitting on it, as that part of the formula is about how far I have gone so far, but it confuses things, I reckon, and could make the DOG redundant, poor thing.....and I really love that dog!

Ground handling (how to store an aeroplane at home and get it to the airfield)

A trial flight in a Thruster, when I was 28, c.1991

I have started to learn to fly before...TWICE! First time round I had just graduated and got a job at an aerodrome in Cornwall, where I earned flying hours by fuelling microlights, giving hourly weather reports to the Met office etc. The weather was bad, so there was little flying to be had...and in the end I was paid with broken propellers and bits of crashed fuselage to hang on the wall. The boss was a great bloke called Ian Stokes, who had been a leading light in forming the BMAA and had manufactured Thrusters in the early days . In retirement he moved to The Gambia and became a publican and, shockingly, was murdered this year.

Flying Rogues

ten years on from my first experiences at Moorland Flying School (and now nearly ten years ago) the flying school was under new management and my girlfriend and I booked full courses. We both made good progress initially but never felt we were being moved on and had difficulty pinning the instructor down to signing our logbooks. When another instructor signed himself as P1, we got suspicious, contacted the CAA and were horrified to learn that our instructor did not have a current instructor rating, that we had not been insured and that none of our hours counted towards our licences. We were eventually refunded and the instructors were prosecuted by the CAA.

The very sympathetic CAA investigator spoke to the BMAA on our behalf and my hours have been allowed to count (at the discretion of the school). But in point of fact, I flew way over the minimum number of hours subsequently, so it is really quite academic in the end.

Around 2001 an instructor in Norfolk tried to convince me that if I bought his aeroplane he could teach me at a cut rate, as I'd then be using my own plane. Great idea, I thought, except that it turned out that the aircraft in question had failed a noise test and could not be used from the instructor's field. He later admitted that I would have to learn on his aeroplane at the normal rate. He resisted showing me the paperwork, kept avoiding me and eventually, when it was quite clear I wasn't going to buy without the paperwork, told me to F-off.

So far my experience has been that there are a lot of rogues in flying, which is one reason why I was so very impressed by the professional set-up at Sywell.

by air to Africa

My sister and I were lucky to fly many thousands of miles in the 1960s and '70s in many aircraft types, including BOAC VC-10s, Boeing 707s and even a Nigerian Airways Dakota, as our dad (and later our mum) had teaching posts in Kenya and Nigeria. Those were still the romantic days of flying, when passengers walked across tarmac and up steps, rather than walking down the tubes that have turned passenger flying into a mundane affair. (Mind you, aren't take-offs still incredibly exciting!?)

Back then air hostesses GAVE children the sorts of nick-nacks that their parents have to pay fortunes for from the airline catalogue these days; things like model aeroplanes, keyrings etc. We were also given sweets to help us cope with depressurisation. (And they were hostesses, so nobody give me a hard time)

Mum says that I cracked my first joke when I was small, on a flight out to Kenya, when I said, "Mummy, shouldn't there be a wing on this side of the plane too". Apparently I got her with that one.

At Kano airport I remember standing behind an engine and thinking how hot it still was....and then being told that the engine was cold. The heat was Kano. I got a headache and took several days to aclimatise.

The airport perri-ways at Kano were littered with aircraft that didn't make it, including a burnt-out Mig 15. The Nigerian Airforce flew them and my dad played squash with one of their pilots, Ben, at the Kano Club. I recall a Mig fly-past on my birthday. Was it arranged with Ben over a beer? Was it a pure coincidence?

At Entebbe airport (Uganda) I remember climbing down the steps on to the runway and being encircled by soldiers with machine guns, who then went through all our belongings and confiscated my cherished Swiss Army penknife, purchased on one of numerous European stop-overs. That was in the twitchy time after the Israeli hijacking ...and mum had to stifle my protests.

Before my first flight to Nairobi, as an infant, I was scared stiff. I didn't understand that I wouldn't have to sit astride the fuselage, as I did on my pedalcar! In a funny way, I not only overcame that fear but have come full circle; microlighting is just like sitting on that pedalcar......open to the elements - real flying!