Luck

Well sometimes the lady rolls the dice in a particular way. I called the DGAC to get more info, apparently there will be an exam in January!!! Yeah I feel totally motivated now, went trough the Exam book and Ooff I still have to do some work, especially on Human Factors, Navigation and some things of the regulations: right now i score on average like 80 - 85% and that is not enough to go well prepared into the exam. Luckily enough I have 2 weeks of leave coming up at Christmas time, so I've plenty of time to prepare the exam.

Apparently my headset is on it's way too, looking forward to it. I found a little device online at Sporty's that changes your pilot headset via USB into a computer headset.

Maybe I can find a similar thing in Europe or heck I'll order it from the Sporty's site. I think it would come in handy with practising the RT work later.

This Sunday I was at the airfield again, nearly went up as well with one of the guys but I didn't have the appropriate clothing for winter flying... notice to self - get my bomberjacket cleaned and find flying overalls.

Well that's it for now, I'm making little progress but I'm enjoying it for every minute

TTFN

Frustration = Motivation?

Life can be a dog of the female persuasion… After ploughing trough my theory book I started investigating when I could take my theory exam, I was planning to do it in December so that if I wouldn’t make the exam the first go I would be able to do a retry and still be free in the early spring to start with the rest of the curriculum. However there is such thing as work, and with the holiday season coming up getting a day off proved pretty much impossible, unless I wanted to give up on my Christmas holidays. And since this will be the first Christmas not spent at work but spent at home since 11 years…

* Sticks two fingers up in the air and it doesn’t exactly look like Churchill doing the V- sign either *

So no biggy until I started further investigations on the site of the DGAC and I found out that the theory exams are now every 3 months! In other words, if I do not make the exam in March I’ll be, like my Irish friends describe it, fecked!

Well turn frust into motivation so I decided that the last thing I’m going to do is fail the bloody exam… (Well dying will probably the last thing I’ll do in my life but hey, you know what I mean) So last week I scored some extra reading material at my favourite pilot shop in Luxembourg to really make sure I will not fail my exam.

Editions Cépadués, the French publishing house where my initial learning book was also published, issued some more publications and some prove to be very useful, well at least that is what I think of it.

First of all I bought the book Aviation Ultra Légère, Comprendre pour mieux pratiquer l'ULM written by Didier Horn. The intended audience is actually more for theory instructors but can also be used by pilots and overinterested students like me to review stuff or get deeper into the background of the several subjects.

It is not a book for sissies though, on chapter one you get a short refresher on mathematics and science and than it digs head on into vectors, airfoil formulas and the application of Bernouilli's theorem. It is a lot more than just the simple example of putting your hand out of a driving car at different angles to notice that if you put it in a slight angle it will be pushed up. All and all a good book for really going deeper into the material in general.

The second book I bought provides a complete overview on the French laws and regulations and is simply called La reglementation du pilote ULM and is written by Daniel Casanova.

Although all rules and regulations can be found on the various governmental sites the writer clearly tried to create a logical overview of everything, you can use it to really study all rules and regulation, but also later as a quick reference book it will come in quite handy I think, and seen the size of the book I thing the editors thought exactly the same. :-)


And finally I bought the ultimate cram book - 400 Questions pour le pilote ULM by Thierry Gobert.

This is really nice, it prepares you completely for the exam, telling you what to expect and then there are the different chapters for each subject in the exam: General Knowledge, Regulations, Human factors, Communication, Mechanical knowlegde, Meteorology and Navigation. The book comes with a red transparent sheet, the purpose is that you put this sheet over the page, as the answers are printed in red they will fade out leaving you with just the questions, so you can do a "fake" exam, and check the answers later on.


And to keep me motivated I also ordered a new headset, a friend pointed it out to me, the specs were ok and the set was reasonably cheap so why not. Even if it only serves me for during my lessons next year it will have been worth its price. Big plus, it has an additional input for an MP3 player and such stuff... so this spring I probably will take a little time to record checklists on my PC and then put them on my iPod. It will be faster to recuperate and I can follow instructions while listening to it without having to loose attention to flying the plane...
I think that might be smart, we'll just see how it will work out in the future. 

Oh yeah, I made some small design changes, let me know what you think of it.
 Thats all, TTFN and happy landings...