More news from the training:
I completed ground school at Av-Ed last week and took the final exam on Friday night, which follows the format of the FAA written exam — 60 multiple-choice questions drawn from among the 600 possible questions that may appear on the FAA written. A passing grade for the Av-Ed exam is 80%, which is required before they will let you take the FAA written – whose passing grade is only 70%. I passed the Av-Ed exam with an 88% — I missed two questions about P-factor, two questions about weather (conditions leading to lenticular cloud formation and advective fog formation), and one about determining manifold pressure in a variable-pitch prop aircraft.

So, the next step is to take the FAA written, which I am going to try and schedule for the second half of this week.

In other news, I finally got to fly again over weekend (1.5 hours of basic maneuvers in the HOAGE airspace) and I learned some really important lessons.

There is a saying that good photographers talk about cameras but great photographers talk about tripods. In the same vein, I’m learning that good pilots talk about aircraft while great pilots talk about weather, weather, and weather.

I started reviewing Area Forecasts and radar outlooks on Wednesday of last week in preparation for my Saturday flight, and then on Friday started reading TAFs for Leesburg, Dulles, National, and Frederick. On Saturday morning, I read the TAFs and METARs for those places, printed out kneeboard charts of JYO (thank you, AOPA) and drove out to Leesburg.

On the walk over to the FAA station to file the flight plan (an out and back from Leesburg to the HOAGE airspace) I mentioned to Alon that I’d grabbed recent weather and altimeter settings just an hour before. Even so, Alon asked for a full weather briefing from the FAA flight desk, and the staff member there treated me to a four or five minute full briefing of the weather, NOTAMs, and ADIZ – much to the dismay of the line of people waiting behind me to file. Finally, during our preflight check we tuned to the Leesburg AWOS and got the latest weather and altimeter setting. So… weather, weather, and weather.

The second lesson is that pilots are very comfortable about taking in a lot of information very quickly. I know we’ve talked about this is meetings and I thought I understood it, but on Saturday I got a crash course (pun intended) on seeing-and-avoiding while also managing throttle, fuel mixture, trim, radio, instruments, avoiding the Class B airspace above our heads — and oh yes, I’m also flying a plane. Alon assures me that as I get more experience I won’t be quite as overwhelmed, but wow, cockpit management is a true challenge.

On a related note, and probably more importantly, I’m learning that they quickly determine what can be safely ignored. Returning from the HOAGE airspace we were crossing the north-to-south ridge between Purceville and Berryvile at 3500ft, when ATC alerted us to Bonanza traffic at our 10 o’clock at 2500 and C172 traffic at 2 o’clock also at 3500ft. I quickly saw the other C172, but I couldn’t locate the Bonanza. I told Alon that I had no-contact on the Bonanza, and he snapped, “The Bonanza isn’t a factor; watch your rate of descent!” In a split second, he’d determined that we had other things to worry about and that we should safely ignore the Bonanza.

I had an interesting day today out in Leesburg yesterday.

I went out for a three hour training session, including a flight. Yesterday’s storm cleared the air and presented us with a beautiful day. There were some overcast cumulus clouds at around 2700, but they were moving off to the east, so my instructor Alon and I initially filed a flight plan with FSS to go out to Winchester/HOAGE, but we immediately had to cancel and re-file due to low ceilings on the ridgeline just west of Leesburg.

We re-filed for Frederick, then went out to the field to pre-flight the 1982 172P we were to be flying. I chose the 172P because it had a carburetor rather than fuel injection, and I wanted to get some experience flying a carburetor aircraft before the weather got too cold and I switched over to an injected aircraft. Also, the 172P is a little cheaper to rent, so I figured I could stretch those dollars further during this first part of my training.

We did a slow and thorough pre-flight, going over every inch of the fuselage, rivet-by-rivet, top to bottom. Early in the preflight, minor problems started to appear. First, there were two rivets missing from the canopy, and one too-loose screw near the alternator assembly. Not a big deal though, and not uncommon in older aircraft, as you well know. Then we noticed that one of the hinge-pins on the right cabin door was loose. The door operated fine and did not pose a safety threat (and according to FAA rules were not a problem), but the combination of that issue and the one on the canopy made Alon feel a bit uneasy.

Finally, we were checking the cockpit and found that the pilot’s radio was inoperative. It received just fine, but could not transmit, which meant that Alon and I would have no way to communicate (except shouting) for the duration of the flight. We found that the broken comm was noted in the maintenance book, but the repair could be legally deferred, because the craft still had one working comm.

He hesitantly offered to take me up anyway, but I was adamant that if I could not ask questions during the flight that I wouldn’t learn anything, and we would both be frustrated. Also, at that point, neither of us completely trusted that the aircraft to take us up.

We completed the formality of pre-flighting the aircraft, just so I could get the experience, then radioed back to the FBO to see if there were any other 172s available. All of them were either out or grounded for repair, so we had to scrub the flight.

So, today was disappointing, but I learned a valuable lesson; go with your instincts, because what is technically airworthy according to the FAA is not always safe. Little things can add up quickly, and I’d rather learn that lesson on the field and not at 4000 feet.