Mike's Flying

Study.

I venture that it’s a dangerously obscure term.

Take for example how I spent a portion of last night (I make no excuses). I spent a good hour building myself a model glider out of Paper and sellotape. Technically I class this as ‘study’, seeing as I was taking care of such things as the angle of incidence, thrust/drag coupling, center of gravity position and the wing dihedral in an attempt to make the thing fairly stable.

Needless to say the craft was a failure. One is limited in ones prowess with a pair of blunt scissors and packaging tape, and little to no knowledge  of the specific aerodynamic challanges facing a model aircraft. Mark 1 of the Mike Flyer how hangs from the ceiling of my room as a reminder of how not to build such things.

I digress. Study is what I’m turning my mind to over the next few weeks. Given that we’ve only 4 weeks of work left before we start the study-leave before our mock exams. Then it’s a week of no classes, a week of mock exams, then a week of no classes and then a week of our JAR exams. The big ones.

The school has developed many facilities to help us through these exams, the instructors are very happy to discuss any problems or points requiring clarification. We have access to something called ‘Feedback’ which is just a coined term for ‘Past Papers’, which are old JAA exam questions. This is especially good because when the nice men set these exams they only deign to add a few new questions every sitting, in theory it’s possible to pass just by memorising all the previously asked questions. Indeed, the nice people down at Bristol Flying school keep an up to date database of all the questions and will allow you access to it for three months for the miserly sum of £50. If you choose to do it that way you’re basically paying £50 to guarantee your passing the JAR exams.

Of course, this ‘Bristoling’ (as it has become known here) isn’t admired by the airlines, and so a healthy working knowledge of any given subject is usually tested at interview.

All in all, I’m going to have an interesting few weeks as we rush to complete the Meteorology syllabus and slowly forget what we’ve learnt in our (recently completed) Radio Navigation lessons.

So until next time, Mk2 of the Mike Flyer is due it’s first flight test.