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.