Same experience with skydiving, only I wanted to see the plane before I even signed up to go. I didn't go. I later found out that they'd asked my flight instructor to take people up, but they *refused* to show him the plane's flight logs when the duct tape attracted his attention.
I am *not* jumping out of a plane unless it's actually ON FIRE. And hey did you read on avweb.com today about the Australian cropduster dude landing his plane while it was ON FIRE over its entire surface? So maybe not even then. If a wing falls off, then I'll jump out.
The John Denver thing was so stupid. I can sort of understand -- based on the foregoing bit -- why one would want to limit fuel in the cockpit. I wonder about having the fuel selector mounted on the firewall with a shaft going through the firewall into the cabin, that moves it from position to position. I'm really unenthusiastic about having fuel lines in where I am, or like the old Pipers clear pipes full of gasoline over your head so you can see the amount of fuel that's about to pour on your head if one of the lines breaks.
The guy who kits up the Bearhawks sometimes offers reasonably low-time O-360's for under $13,000. That'd sure beat a 235. I also wonder: you SHOULD get your complex and high-performance signoffs, obviously, but if you built up your LongEX with a 235 and a fixed-pitch prop, would it actually require either? Can you GET an adjustable prop with a 235? (Electric, I guess?)
The welding is great. I gas welded a little a decade ago, but I spend hours each week doing hot glasswork, and that, as it turns out, is very similar to gas welding and TIG welding. My *first* weld in 6061 aluminum, 0.040", was pretty much gorgeous. The first weld in steel? fabulous. I should've bought one of these YEARS ago. However, if you're talking about smallish fixtures, you could cast them. Doing home casting of aluminum is fairly easy and it's amazing what forms you can produce.
I was hoping to use cyclopropenes as the starting materials and do wonderful and exotic things with them, rather than make them. I've made them already, and it sucked. Stupid rhodium catalysts.
I was in an advanced organic synthesis class. The project was "make something new. Preferably by an unusual synthesis." My first project is not discussable these days, given the current political climate, but my second project was making a cyclopropene, turning it into a cyclohexene (!), and then turning THAT into a spiro compound with one six and one seven membered ring. (!!!) It was way out there on the weirdness scale, but the problem was that the cyclopropene was, as one might expect, very suseptible to polymerization, so I mostly ended up making round-bottom flasks full of solid brown tar. I could dig up the papers from which I was working, but this was, uh, 15 years ago (eeeek!) and I can't remember all the details off the top of my head. I can't imagine what one could do with a metathesis reaction, although I suspect you'd spend most of your time just synthesizing the catalyst. Most of those look like boogers to make, and not very many were/are commercially available (and those that are probably cost hundreds of dollars a gram.)
Americans produce more stuff than anyone else. That means pollution, noise, and trash, as well as brilliant chemistry. Unfortunately, in the last twenty or so years, we seem to be doing a lot better on the pollution, noise, and idiotic comments side than the superb inventions side...
These are spectacular reactions: they allow for all sorts of neat syntheses if you can just form terminal alkenes, which isn't too hard. The systems aren't horribly abusive to most side-chains so you don't have to spend lots of time (and reduce your yield) protecting everything in sight.
I think it's interesting how many nobel prizes have been given for work on the C=C bond: Diels-Alder, Wittig, reduction, oxidation... I think that more nobels have been given for x-ray techniques than anything else, but this must be well up there. (Of course that depends on how broadly you classify your groupings.)
But this particular synthesis is already producing some amazing results in bioactive materials, and it should be a strong industrial technique, given its apparent robustness. Back when I was doing organic chemistry, I was trying to make a weird cyclopropene using a synthesis that was multi-step and very low yield. I wish I'd read about this.
I've seen some pretty podunk flight schools. Consider finding another flight school when there's duct tape on the wheelpants or inside the cabin. Ditto that when more than two instruments are placarded 'out of service'. Or when the radio fails, and then a week later, in the same plane, it fails again. In fact, I've given this advice elsewhere, but: don't pre-pay for flight lessons. I've watched three or four flight schools go out of business, stranding their students, and while it sucked for the pay-as-you-go kids, it *really* sucked for the pre-pay kids, especially the ones who were from out-of-country and suddenly had neither money nor any local contacts.
It seems like a good idea to get the private first. Focus on one area at a time, right? Flying, then shaking the bugs out of a Cozy/LongEZ, rather than putting some of your early X-C time in with a somewhat unfamiliar plane, also known as the John Denver syndrome.
Your plane will be faster. I'm planning on big flaps, leading-edge slats, and big tires. I'd like to turbocharge -- turbonormalize, really -- it to help with altitude, since I'll be flying into my grandparents' place in Leadville, Colorado. The airport's at 9950 feet elevation, but they live adjacent to a large open flat treeless swath of BLM land somewhat above that. THAT should be fun...
I just bought a TIG welder. I also just bought a bunch of cheap steel tubing. This weekend, I'm going to start learning to weld tubing. This should be fun. First I'll tear some welds apart, then get some cr-mo and make a bike frame or two, and then maybe it's time to start on a fuselage. Yikes.
I got my training through a crappy podunk school, so I'm guessing my ground school was as good as anything they would've provided. It sounds like you're spending more time and effort on this than I did. In which case, have you looked at the Part 141 schools? They do things *right*: complete FAA-certified training course, intending to crank out professional pilots. It'd cost more, but it's pretty thorough. I know one person who went that route; she was snapped up by FedEx as soon as she got out of school. Tho' you've already found a good school, it sounds like, the 141 stuff might be worth looking at.
Getting a rec will encourage you to get lots and lots of time, and you'll probably get the private in the minimum hours (logged/paid) from that experience. That's a good way to do it, if you have access to something that flies.
I'm looking forward to Sport Pilot transforming (I hope) the field, but I'm not in their price league, which is why I'll be building. No canards for me: I'll probably end up with something like a Bearhawk with a Mazda hanging out front. I'll wave as you go zooming past.
1. Why pay for ground school? I'm no expert, but neither I nor those of my two other friends who have their PPL took formal ground school. We just studied, studied, studied, took online FAA tests, studied more. That saved a buttload of money.
2. I'm curious why you're going for recreational first. Just to get up in the air? I think that's cool: I just haven't met anyone that's gone this route.
3. The jetwash thing I was referring to was specifically racing with rocketplanes. Separation at airports should be quite sufficient to avoid this, even at the non-controlled airports I usually fly from.
4. Some day I *will* build an airplane. Good for you and I hope your first flights in the LongEZ go well.
You're entirely right.
I'm not looking forward to the turbulence of someone else's rocket wake in a hard turn.
WRT the BD-10, I had heard (apparently wrongly) that there were two copies built, each flew once, each crashed, one on approach to landing (unequal flap deployment -> spin -> smoking hole in ground syndrome) and the other in flight (tail tore off -> uncontrollable -> smoking hole in ground syndrome) so I'll have to research that more.
That's what I've been doing for a while. I figured, in the late '90's, that there were all these free porn-hosting websites, and there was steganography, and the two combine easily. Strip all your files into chunks and store redundant parts here and there, and write something to look around and make sure they're all there. It's like distributed porn RAID.
There are a number of homebuilt jets already around.
The BD-10 jet was intended to be supersonic (designed by the same guy who made the BD-5) but the first two produced both crashed about the time Bede went bankrupt.
The ATG Javelin is approaching production; it's supposed to be very, very fast. It was based on a homebuilt.
Similarly, Maverick has some hot-looking material for the homebuilder.
There are several other pure homebuilts, including some plansbuilt (presumably not the engine...) on the market, as well, but since I'm at work I don't have a complete list.
Well, but.
1. Insulin isn't a great example: it undergoes a lot of post-transcriptional modification, that bacteria can't do easily but eukaryotes can. While the initial form can be made by bacteria, it's not like you can generate ready-to-use insulin just by splicing a little bit of DNA into a bacterium. With that said, small batch and large batch continuous production and separation of chemicals from bacterial vats, aka industrial microbiology, is a very well-studied field that has a large body of experience associated with it. I've read that turning Fleming's penicillin-producing yeast into an industrial process for production of antibiotics was a larger project than producing the fission bomb.
2. The hope is that once we can get bacteria to produce arbitrary proteins, we can build proteins that will fold into enzymes with active sites that have a specified topology and charge structure. With that, we can build almost anything, because the proteins will be the factories, converting starting materials of arbitrary (probably carbon-based) composition into the ending materials we want. A cascade of enzymes convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into trees and penguins. So using bacteria to create other organic compounds -- which is what they already do: they produce themselves -- isn't a big deal.
Building an arbitrary protein is a big step. Finding ways of predicting protein folding so that the resultant enzyme is stable and functional is a very big step. Figuring out how to predict what surface topology will catalyze a given reaction is an enormous step.
Many many WWII fighters had water injection. Like one of the other repliers indicates, it was used because prior to WWII the aviation fuel (and fuel in general) was crap. The higher-compression engines they were using (to get more power) combined with the variances in the fuel, meant that sometimes the fuel would detonate in the chamber. (Detonation, if you don't know, is the uncontrolled, very rapid, burning of the fuel/oxygen mixture rather than the comparatively smoother burn of a spark ignition. The engine head is designed to promote a smooth burn from the spark. Detonation also occurs earlier -- by definition, since it wouldn't happen once the spark triggers -- and that means much of the power of the rapid explosion hits the still-rising piston, massively stressing the engine.) Water injection lowers the temperature of the charge, which effectively increases its octane rating, retarding its tendency to detonate. One of the major advances the US made, under strong pressure from, among others, WWI flyer and WWII commander Jimmy Doolittle, was to make very good fuel, that was both high-octane and consistent. This allowed the aircraft engines to run high-compression, get lots of power, and extend their range to be able to bomb much further into enemy territory than any other country could guarantee at the time.
Water injection for cars would really only be useful if the cars have very high compression engines, like over 10.5:1, and since nobody these days seems to have the technical competence to rebuild engines, preferring to just remap their controllers, it's not so useful. Besides, it'd play hell with the electronic control units.
Seriously. I always know where I am. My instructor used to ask me at random points and I could point to exactly where I was. I remember one time I was flying over Denver and ATC said I had to stay on the west side of I-70 through downtown. My instructor said, "okay, where's the Interstate?" looking down at Denver and I pointed down, "There's Sheridan, there's Federal, there's the Interstate." Even when I was on my longest-yet cross-country, out over Kansas and Nebraska, I flew out along the Platte River, which is full of little characteristic twists, and back along three highways in Wyoming. When you're flying across Nebraska and Wyoming, there are times when it's a good twenty minutes between *any* sign of human habitation: just wilderness. That's when streams come in handy. I think I rely on them more than anything else. When I'm flying in the Colorado Rockies, is when it's most difficult, because a lot of the valley-with-little-vallies-branching-off look pretty similar. That's when it's down to looking for old roads and where they are in relation to streams and such. (It also helps that I've mountain-biked almost everywhere I've ever flown in the mountains.)
Some day I'd love a PC-12. I'll stick with a Maule for the time being, though.
My Telex-100 was about $100. It's cheap, but it's far far better than any of the rental headsets I was using early on. There are plenty of dynamic noise-cancelling headsets for $500. They're very nice but the majority of them use (for some dumb reason) external battery packs that require being switched off at the end of the flight, so people are *always* forgetting and running the batteries dry and don't have a functional headset next time they fly. Why on EARTH they don't use a 14/28volt supply from the airplane, OR an automatic power-off if there hasn't been any activity in the last hour, I will never know.
If other people haven't already replied: children who have sight restored after age 3 or 4 don't really develop useful sight -- although it's much better than nothing at all. (At least that's what my girlfriend's ophthalmology books say.)
I couldn't remember when I wrote the above -- I just knew it was a LONG time before 'terrorism' was talked about in the US. And yeah, I do remember the discussion of the WTC, now that you mention it.
They *require* 40 hours. Expect it will take you more and budget accordingly. If you want to get your license efficiently, save up your money before you start. Get a good instructor -- prefer middle-aged or older guy rather than the 21-year-olds who get the job in the majors halfway through training and disappear and you have to go find a new instructor. Set an aggressive training schedule -- fly mon, wed, fri *every week*. If you fly once a week you average roughly 65 hours to private, if you fly twice it's more like 55-60, and if you fly three times it's closer to 50. Flying every other day is the single best thing you can do to make it through quickly and cheaply.
Around here, instruction time is about $100-150/hour (that's paying instructor and airplane rental) and you figure you're going to need at least 20, probably 30 hours. Solo time is about $65-85/hour, assume 20-30 hours. Go somewhere like Aviation Spruce and get a flight kit -- bag, books -- that the instructor will work with. (They sell cheaper than your FBO will.) Get one with a paper E6B 'calculator' (actually a slide rule) because the FAA requires you use the non-electrical version to take your test and once you've taken it you'll use a calculator forever after so no use getting the expensive metal E6B unless you like geek bling. The bookset is about $200.
Getting your own headset -- a Telex 100, frinstance -- is a tiny bit more expensive than renting one but so incredibly worth it.
Before you do ANY of that: go on a discovery flight, see if you LIKE flying. Then go to an FAA medical examiner and get a physical and find out if you *can* fly. I've known people who got to pre-solo before finding out they had some weird medical problem that made them unflyworthy. Save yourself some money: you'll NEED the medical before you test, so get it early. If you take my advice, it'll only take you about three months to get to test time anyway, and medical examiners are notoriously difficult to make appointments with, so get it done early.
Make sure it's FUN and that you're enjoying it. Stop when it starts feeling draggy. Fly as often as you can, and read up about it. Install a flight simulator. (The only reason I still use windows is because Microsoft Flight Sim is unbeatable.) Use it regularly. Learn how to do instrument approaches with it. That could save your life. Learn how to tune VOR's and navigate with them. Do your cross-countries on the sim the day beforehand, complete with your maps on your lap and making your radio calls into a silent room. It WILL help.
The written and practical tests run about $200 each. The presolo test is usually pretty informal and doesn't involve any money. Add in an extra $200 for random expenses. I think if you have $6300 sitting in a bank account you will have a fair amount left over afterwards, if you're diligent about training, but I wouldn't start training without $5000 in the bank.
And do NOT pre-pay your instruction to the flying club. They are notorious for going out of business on a moment's notice and stranding people who have done this.
eeeeek?
I don't want to sound negative, but reading this really worries me. I *never* was lost, or anything close to it, through my entire training or the next 100 hours of flight time. I've always known exactly where I am, without using my (handheld, extra batteries in flight bag, not dependent on airplane power) GPS. 95% of the time I could've done it without the VOR's I was using nonstop, just by pilotage. It helps a little that I live on the Front Range of Colorado and can always see a mountain I recognize if I'm within 200 miles of the airports I usually fly from, but even so: study your maps before you take off, learn where the rivers and highways are, and fly along them. Don't just draw point-to-point and fly that. You can do that when you're flying instrument. Until then, base all your flying on unambiguous ground reference pilotage, and correlate with the VOR. Get a cheap ($150) GPS and keep it in your flight bag as a backup.
(I had to use my GPS once, when I wasn't the pilot, just the copilot, and we got in a stupid situation trapped above clouds and couldn't use pilotage. I will never get in that situation again.)
As for the flying car thing, you're right, but there are some free flight possibilities on the horizon that might make it work: automated radar that tracks vectors of nearby aircraft and alerts you if there's any possibility of collision, exist and will be cheap enough (uh, well, considering avionics price, *comparatively* cheap) that they'll fit in private aircraft within ten years.
I couldn't get my modem working. I was new at linux administration, although I'd been using unix for years, so I thought it'd work just great to do something like:
cd/dev
for x in `ls` do echo "ATDT4911234" >> $x; done
and listen for the modem so I could figure out its location.
turns out/dev/hda1 comes WAY before/dev/(serial stuff) and it does not like having random stuff written to it. I don't know quite what happened but it didn't boot anymore.
All gyrocopters fly that way. The forward momentum drives the rotor; the engine provides the forward momentum. One massive advantage of this is that if the engine dies, the gyro flies just exactly like it did beforehand, but you will be landing very soon. They can be landed under perfect control with a very short landing roll -- like, say, a parking lot -- so are safer in engine failure than either an airplane or a helicopter. (A few gyros have rotor clutch mechanisms so they can take off from a standing start, but the vast majority require an airstrip for takeoff.)
You can build an ultralight gyro (as in no license required) at home for well under $15,000. The Canadian company, Rotary Air Force, has a bunch of quite well-regarded models.
As a fixed-wing pilot, I regularly hear some variance on "a helicopter is a bunch of engineering compromises flying in close formation, waiting for metal fatigue to set in."
Slashdot Mirror
I am *not* jumping out of a plane unless it's actually ON FIRE. And hey did you read on avweb.com today about the Australian cropduster dude landing his plane while it was ON FIRE over its entire surface? So maybe not even then. If a wing falls off, then I'll jump out.
The John Denver thing was so stupid. I can sort of understand -- based on the foregoing bit -- why one would want to limit fuel in the cockpit. I wonder about having the fuel selector mounted on the firewall with a shaft going through the firewall into the cabin, that moves it from position to position. I'm really unenthusiastic about having fuel lines in where I am, or like the old Pipers clear pipes full of gasoline over your head so you can see the amount of fuel that's about to pour on your head if one of the lines breaks.
The guy who kits up the Bearhawks sometimes offers reasonably low-time O-360's for under $13,000. That'd sure beat a 235. I also wonder: you SHOULD get your complex and high-performance signoffs, obviously, but if you built up your LongEX with a 235 and a fixed-pitch prop, would it actually require either? Can you GET an adjustable prop with a 235? (Electric, I guess?)
The welding is great. I gas welded a little a decade ago, but I spend hours each week doing hot glasswork, and that, as it turns out, is very similar to gas welding and TIG welding. My *first* weld in 6061 aluminum, 0.040", was pretty much gorgeous. The first weld in steel? fabulous. I should've bought one of these YEARS ago. However, if you're talking about smallish fixtures, you could cast them. Doing home casting of aluminum is fairly easy and it's amazing what forms you can produce.
I was hoping to use cyclopropenes as the starting materials and do wonderful and exotic things with them, rather than make them. I've made them already, and it sucked. Stupid rhodium catalysts.
I was in an advanced organic synthesis class. The project was "make something new. Preferably by an unusual synthesis." My first project is not discussable these days, given the current political climate, but my second project was making a cyclopropene, turning it into a cyclohexene (!), and then turning THAT into a spiro compound with one six and one seven membered ring. (!!!) It was way out there on the weirdness scale, but the problem was that the cyclopropene was, as one might expect, very suseptible to polymerization, so I mostly ended up making round-bottom flasks full of solid brown tar. I could dig up the papers from which I was working, but this was, uh, 15 years ago (eeeek!) and I can't remember all the details off the top of my head. I can't imagine what one could do with a metathesis reaction, although I suspect you'd spend most of your time just synthesizing the catalyst. Most of those look like boogers to make, and not very many were/are commercially available (and those that are probably cost hundreds of dollars a gram.)
Americans produce more stuff than anyone else. That means pollution, noise, and trash, as well as brilliant chemistry. Unfortunately, in the last twenty or so years, we seem to be doing a lot better on the pollution, noise, and idiotic comments side than the superb inventions side...
I think it's interesting how many nobel prizes have been given for work on the C=C bond: Diels-Alder, Wittig, reduction, oxidation... I think that more nobels have been given for x-ray techniques than anything else, but this must be well up there. (Of course that depends on how broadly you classify your groupings.)
But this particular synthesis is already producing some amazing results in bioactive materials, and it should be a strong industrial technique, given its apparent robustness. Back when I was doing organic chemistry, I was trying to make a weird cyclopropene using a synthesis that was multi-step and very low yield. I wish I'd read about this.
It seems like a good idea to get the private first. Focus on one area at a time, right? Flying, then shaking the bugs out of a Cozy/LongEZ, rather than putting some of your early X-C time in with a somewhat unfamiliar plane, also known as the John Denver syndrome.
Your plane will be faster. I'm planning on big flaps, leading-edge slats, and big tires. I'd like to turbocharge -- turbonormalize, really -- it to help with altitude, since I'll be flying into my grandparents' place in Leadville, Colorado. The airport's at 9950 feet elevation, but they live adjacent to a large open flat treeless swath of BLM land somewhat above that. THAT should be fun...
I just bought a TIG welder. I also just bought a bunch of cheap steel tubing. This weekend, I'm going to start learning to weld tubing. This should be fun. First I'll tear some welds apart, then get some cr-mo and make a bike frame or two, and then maybe it's time to start on a fuselage. Yikes.
Getting a rec will encourage you to get lots and lots of time, and you'll probably get the private in the minimum hours (logged/paid) from that experience. That's a good way to do it, if you have access to something that flies.
I'm looking forward to Sport Pilot transforming (I hope) the field, but I'm not in their price league, which is why I'll be building. No canards for me: I'll probably end up with something like a Bearhawk with a Mazda hanging out front. I'll wave as you go zooming past.
2. I'm curious why you're going for recreational first. Just to get up in the air? I think that's cool: I just haven't met anyone that's gone this route.
3. The jetwash thing I was referring to was specifically racing with rocketplanes. Separation at airports should be quite sufficient to avoid this, even at the non-controlled airports I usually fly from.
4. Some day I *will* build an airplane. Good for you and I hope your first flights in the LongEZ go well.
You're entirely right. I'm not looking forward to the turbulence of someone else's rocket wake in a hard turn. WRT the BD-10, I had heard (apparently wrongly) that there were two copies built, each flew once, each crashed, one on approach to landing (unequal flap deployment -> spin -> smoking hole in ground syndrome) and the other in flight (tail tore off -> uncontrollable -> smoking hole in ground syndrome) so I'll have to research that more.
I wouldn't'v'd the guts to propose such an awful-looking solution.
That's what I've been doing for a while. I figured, in the late '90's, that there were all these free porn-hosting websites, and there was steganography, and the two combine easily. Strip all your files into chunks and store redundant parts here and there, and write something to look around and make sure they're all there. It's like distributed porn RAID.
The ATG Javelin is approaching production; it's supposed to be very, very fast. It was based on a homebuilt.
The Viperjet is also extremely fast, and likewise was based on a homebuilt.
Aerocomp has a homebuilt jet. I don't think they're selling kits for it yet, but they will be very soon.
Similarly, Maverick has some hot-looking material for the homebuilder.
There are several other pure homebuilts, including some plansbuilt (presumably not the engine...) on the market, as well, but since I'm at work I don't have a complete list.
Well, but. 1. Insulin isn't a great example: it undergoes a lot of post-transcriptional modification, that bacteria can't do easily but eukaryotes can. While the initial form can be made by bacteria, it's not like you can generate ready-to-use insulin just by splicing a little bit of DNA into a bacterium. With that said, small batch and large batch continuous production and separation of chemicals from bacterial vats, aka industrial microbiology, is a very well-studied field that has a large body of experience associated with it. I've read that turning Fleming's penicillin-producing yeast into an industrial process for production of antibiotics was a larger project than producing the fission bomb. 2. The hope is that once we can get bacteria to produce arbitrary proteins, we can build proteins that will fold into enzymes with active sites that have a specified topology and charge structure. With that, we can build almost anything, because the proteins will be the factories, converting starting materials of arbitrary (probably carbon-based) composition into the ending materials we want. A cascade of enzymes convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into trees and penguins. So using bacteria to create other organic compounds -- which is what they already do: they produce themselves -- isn't a big deal. Building an arbitrary protein is a big step. Finding ways of predicting protein folding so that the resultant enzyme is stable and functional is a very big step. Figuring out how to predict what surface topology will catalyze a given reaction is an enormous step.
Many many WWII fighters had water injection. Like one of the other repliers indicates, it was used because prior to WWII the aviation fuel (and fuel in general) was crap. The higher-compression engines they were using (to get more power) combined with the variances in the fuel, meant that sometimes the fuel would detonate in the chamber. (Detonation, if you don't know, is the uncontrolled, very rapid, burning of the fuel/oxygen mixture rather than the comparatively smoother burn of a spark ignition. The engine head is designed to promote a smooth burn from the spark. Detonation also occurs earlier -- by definition, since it wouldn't happen once the spark triggers -- and that means much of the power of the rapid explosion hits the still-rising piston, massively stressing the engine.) Water injection lowers the temperature of the charge, which effectively increases its octane rating, retarding its tendency to detonate.
One of the major advances the US made, under strong pressure from, among others, WWI flyer and WWII commander Jimmy Doolittle, was to make very good fuel, that was both high-octane and consistent. This allowed the aircraft engines to run high-compression, get lots of power, and extend their range to be able to bomb much further into enemy territory than any other country could guarantee at the time.
Water injection for cars would really only be useful if the cars have very high compression engines, like over 10.5:1, and since nobody these days seems to have the technical competence to rebuild engines, preferring to just remap their controllers, it's not so useful. Besides, it'd play hell with the electronic control units.
Seriously. I always know where I am. My instructor used to ask me at random points and I could point to exactly where I was. I remember one time I was flying over Denver and ATC said I had to stay on the west side of I-70 through downtown. My instructor said, "okay, where's the Interstate?" looking down at Denver and I pointed down, "There's Sheridan, there's Federal, there's the Interstate." Even when I was on my longest-yet cross-country, out over Kansas and Nebraska, I flew out along the Platte River, which is full of little characteristic twists, and back along three highways in Wyoming. When you're flying across Nebraska and Wyoming, there are times when it's a good twenty minutes between *any* sign of human habitation: just wilderness. That's when streams come in handy. I think I rely on them more than anything else. When I'm flying in the Colorado Rockies, is when it's most difficult, because a lot of the valley-with-little-vallies-branching-off look pretty similar. That's when it's down to looking for old roads and where they are in relation to streams and such. (It also helps that I've mountain-biked almost everywhere I've ever flown in the mountains.) Some day I'd love a PC-12. I'll stick with a Maule for the time being, though.
My Telex-100 was about $100. It's cheap, but it's far far better than any of the rental headsets I was using early on. There are plenty of dynamic noise-cancelling headsets for $500. They're very nice but the majority of them use (for some dumb reason) external battery packs that require being switched off at the end of the flight, so people are *always* forgetting and running the batteries dry and don't have a functional headset next time they fly. Why on EARTH they don't use a 14/28volt supply from the airplane, OR an automatic power-off if there hasn't been any activity in the last hour, I will never know.
If other people haven't already replied: children who have sight restored after age 3 or 4 don't really develop useful sight -- although it's much better than nothing at all. (At least that's what my girlfriend's ophthalmology books say.)
I couldn't remember when I wrote the above -- I just knew it was a LONG time before 'terrorism' was talked about in the US. And yeah, I do remember the discussion of the WTC, now that you mention it.
It's going to be a little tricky sinking piles that deep for every building.
They *require* 40 hours. Expect it will take you more and budget accordingly. If you want to get your license efficiently, save up your money before you start. Get a good instructor -- prefer middle-aged or older guy rather than the 21-year-olds who get the job in the majors halfway through training and disappear and you have to go find a new instructor. Set an aggressive training schedule -- fly mon, wed, fri *every week*. If you fly once a week you average roughly 65 hours to private, if you fly twice it's more like 55-60, and if you fly three times it's closer to 50. Flying every other day is the single best thing you can do to make it through quickly and cheaply.
Around here, instruction time is about $100-150/hour (that's paying instructor and airplane rental) and you figure you're going to need at least 20, probably 30 hours. Solo time is about $65-85/hour, assume 20-30 hours. Go somewhere like Aviation Spruce and get a flight kit -- bag, books -- that the instructor will work with. (They sell cheaper than your FBO will.) Get one with a paper E6B 'calculator' (actually a slide rule) because the FAA requires you use the non-electrical version to take your test and once you've taken it you'll use a calculator forever after so no use getting the expensive metal E6B unless you like geek bling. The bookset is about $200.
Getting your own headset -- a Telex 100, frinstance -- is a tiny bit more expensive than renting one but so incredibly worth it.
Before you do ANY of that: go on a discovery flight, see if you LIKE flying. Then go to an FAA medical examiner and get a physical and find out if you *can* fly. I've known people who got to pre-solo before finding out they had some weird medical problem that made them unflyworthy. Save yourself some money: you'll NEED the medical before you test, so get it early. If you take my advice, it'll only take you about three months to get to test time anyway, and medical examiners are notoriously difficult to make appointments with, so get it done early.
Make sure it's FUN and that you're enjoying it. Stop when it starts feeling draggy. Fly as often as you can, and read up about it. Install a flight simulator. (The only reason I still use windows is because Microsoft Flight Sim is unbeatable.) Use it regularly. Learn how to do instrument approaches with it. That could save your life. Learn how to tune VOR's and navigate with them. Do your cross-countries on the sim the day beforehand, complete with your maps on your lap and making your radio calls into a silent room. It WILL help.
The written and practical tests run about $200 each. The presolo test is usually pretty informal and doesn't involve any money. Add in an extra $200 for random expenses. I think if you have $6300 sitting in a bank account you will have a fair amount left over afterwards, if you're diligent about training, but I wouldn't start training without $5000 in the bank.
And do NOT pre-pay your instruction to the flying club. They are notorious for going out of business on a moment's notice and stranding people who have done this.
eeeeek? I don't want to sound negative, but reading this really worries me. I *never* was lost, or anything close to it, through my entire training or the next 100 hours of flight time. I've always known exactly where I am, without using my (handheld, extra batteries in flight bag, not dependent on airplane power) GPS. 95% of the time I could've done it without the VOR's I was using nonstop, just by pilotage. It helps a little that I live on the Front Range of Colorado and can always see a mountain I recognize if I'm within 200 miles of the airports I usually fly from, but even so: study your maps before you take off, learn where the rivers and highways are, and fly along them. Don't just draw point-to-point and fly that. You can do that when you're flying instrument. Until then, base all your flying on unambiguous ground reference pilotage, and correlate with the VOR. Get a cheap ($150) GPS and keep it in your flight bag as a backup. (I had to use my GPS once, when I wasn't the pilot, just the copilot, and we got in a stupid situation trapped above clouds and couldn't use pilotage. I will never get in that situation again.) As for the flying car thing, you're right, but there are some free flight possibilities on the horizon that might make it work: automated radar that tracks vectors of nearby aircraft and alerts you if there's any possibility of collision, exist and will be cheap enough (uh, well, considering avionics price, *comparatively* cheap) that they'll fit in private aircraft within ten years.
I couldn't get my modem working. I was new at linux administration, although I'd been using unix for years, so I thought it'd work just great to do something like: cd /dev
for x in `ls` do echo "ATDT4911234" >> $x; done
and listen for the modem so I could figure out its location.
turns out /dev/hda1 comes WAY before /dev/(serial stuff) and it does not like having random stuff written to it. I don't know quite what happened but it didn't boot anymore.
All gyrocopters fly that way. The forward momentum drives the rotor; the engine provides the forward momentum. One massive advantage of this is that if the engine dies, the gyro flies just exactly like it did beforehand, but you will be landing very soon. They can be landed under perfect control with a very short landing roll -- like, say, a parking lot -- so are safer in engine failure than either an airplane or a helicopter. (A few gyros have rotor clutch mechanisms so they can take off from a standing start, but the vast majority require an airstrip for takeoff.) You can build an ultralight gyro (as in no license required) at home for well under $15,000. The Canadian company, Rotary Air Force, has a bunch of quite well-regarded models.
As a fixed-wing pilot, I regularly hear some variance on "a helicopter is a bunch of engineering compromises flying in close formation, waiting for metal fatigue to set in."