Well put comrade! BTW, does part of that training include the hours you spent air racing?Originally posted by LuckyBoy1:
Yep, I tell you what, yes, I know you only need a few hours... geeze, I've forgotten the reg it's been so long... for all I remember it was an hour and a half to four hours of navigational training to get your private VFR ticket... which, unfortunately for most to hear, is dangerously too little time.
I was trained a total of 16 hours to start in navigation and 36 hours more of navigational training when I went for my IFR ticket even though it was not required I guess. Again, I did it because it was "suggested" and back then, that's all they had to do and you'd do it... or at least I did!
Through he whole thing, the basic theme ended up going something like...
You try to confirm by three different navigational means what your position is and they should all aggree. If you get to a point where you can't even get two of them to be the same point on the map, you are long and officially lost! At that point, you get on the radio, announce that you ARE lost and take your beatings when you land.
Then, sometime in the early 1980's they went to a more punative sytle of managing private pilots due to what was perceived as some abuse of the honor system. It used to be that if you got lost, you were sat down and scolded and you sent them some documentation showing that you took some more formal navigational training and all would be forgiven. Not anymore man! They slam pilots at every turn these days.
I can't tell you whether the old philosophy for correcting bad piloting was better than the current system. All I'm saying is that especially with cheap avionics being so readily available in such reliable forms that are so easy to use and so many varied systems, you should never, and I mean never have any reason to even doubt where you are and not be able to confirm your position 3 or more ways. For God's sake, you can even get color radar for less than $2,00.00 in a private plane that back in 1970, commercial pilots would kill to have at any price!
The modern guy in me says...
Hey man, just come on down to my part of the world for a few days and I'll show you.
The good old fashioned pilot in me won't let that happen because I know I'm not rated to instruct on the subject. Navigation courses are available. Are they required?... who cares? They are beneficial, so if you haven't done it, you are shooting cr@ps with your and the publics safety and you know it!
What you do about it is up to you!
No, insanely enough, no training is required in order to pylon race!
Believe it or not, it's not the complicated things or the difficult things that leads to crashes and off course aircraft. It's the boring and tedious stuff that will kill you every time. Odd little things like...
Checking visually to see that there is as much fuel in the tank as the gauge says.
Physically checking the water traps to make sure there is no water in the system even though you know full well the gas is fresh and new and certified by the FAA.
Remembering to take the pitot tube protectors off... woops!, I was once guilty of that and only discovered my mistake when running down the runway and still showing no air speed indicated.
Checked the oil? Yes, I know it gets inspected and rebuilt more often than needed, but still, did you?
Checked the air in the tires? I've seen three crashes that all were due at least in part to uneven or improper air pressure in the tires. Kinda sad to do everything else right and then crash for that one!
Nope, the devil's in the details, so everyone who flies needs to pay special attention to boring little tasks like... noticing the F-16's before their third flare burst!![]()
The guy, who landed on red square was a German, Mathias Rust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
Check google for more.
If I remember correctly, he flew so low with his cessna, that the radar had hard time to spot him and his small plane. By the biography, he seems to be quite a bozo, but at least he did the Moscow trip intentionally and without harming anyone else. If it wasn't so stupid, it would be called brave.
I've been in private airplanes with F-16's about. Been buzzed by a few too once, 323 Sqn bad sense of humor I call it. If their at relatively the same speed their pretty easy to spot at close range. They may look smallish on pictures and on the tarmac alone but compared to your little coffeegrinder their huge mo-fo's. Once they slow down to your speed, start popping flares and you still dont notice them untill the 3rd burst of flares you need to have your eyes checked out and probably have to bad eyesight to pilot a airplane to begin with.
Ummm... From hindsight, I can certainly tell you that I don't consider myself a pilot back when I was just taking lessons. Takes a lot more experience, and hair-losing, spine tingling, tighty-whitey staining moments to really be able to call yourself a real pilot than just lessons. It all starts kicking in when you do your first XC solos through unfamiliar airspace. A few radio failures here, a few miscalculations there, and a few interspersed emergencies here and there. When you manage to get through that and learn from it, then you can start calling yourself a pilot. It's all a walk in the park until you are in the middle of nowhere with a broken radio, VFR diminishing, and with a less than full gas tank; and it is here where you realize that this isn't just something fun you do on the weekends, but rather a matter of life and death where instinct, skill, balls and self control are put to the test.
And that's exactly it, Luckyboy... He isn't as responsible as you, which is why he flies with an instructor until at least he is cleared to solo.
Hard to believe that seeing a city coming up they didn't check the compass. If you run into a big city coming out of Lancaster, PA, you d@mn sure should be able to tell you're going the wrong way. South is DC, east would be West Chester then Philly, west would be York and north you'd get lost.
edit, well, Lebanon is north.