The Learning Curve

Hmm. I have so fallen into the trap that has caught many other bloggers.What with Facebook and twitter hogging my attention the blog has suffered. Seven months into the year and no post whatsoever. better late than never!

So Last time I was in the blogosphere I was on about my first experience as the Pilot in command. A lot has happened since then, logged many more solo hours and learnt a lot along the way. I eventually got my Private Pilot license and recently passed the 100 hour mark. There's a saying that goes at 100 hours a pilot thinks he knows everything, at 1000 he does know everything and at 10000 hours he realizes that he knows nothing! So you can see where I fall in all of this right now.

Flying is interesting, there's always something new to learn and I doubt there's any pilot who can say he knows everything. In my short aviation career I've had numerous lessons drilled into me, some with ease and others with difficulty. There's one lesson that really stuck as I'll explain.

Referreing to my previous post I had detailed how prior to my first solo I had gone on a check ride with the big man of the school and that he had taken some time to take me back to basics. The exercise he drilled me on was called control co-ordinaton, here's where I launch into some technical mumbo- jumbo so please bear with me. Let me explain, turning an aeroplane is a delicate art which invollve proper co-ordination of hands, eyes and feet. Naturally you would think that you bank( turn i.e) usign the control column alone but your feet have to move in tandem otherwise the result won't be so good to put it simply. Hope you get the picture. It's a pretty basic skill but at the time my handling of it was not to his satisfaction so I had to endure the embarassment of being taught again.

Fast forward to a few weeks later when I went on anothe check ride with another instructor. It was a mess of a flight could hardly get anything right and he ended up recommending that I repeat it. However there was one positive remark in all of it- "You can co-ordinate!" Still laugh when I remember that story, lesson learnt- the hard way!


More on my adventures and misadventures in the air shall be coming soon, stay tuned...