Today marks the official second half of my private ground school. Tomorrow is my second test. This test will be covering performance, weight and balance, AIM, ADF, VOR, and the calculator side of the E6B flight computer.

Since this is exactly half, I will give you a brief idea about how I'm liking the ground school so far.

Right now, I have had 5 ground school instructors. All classes are 4 hours long, sometimes with an hour break in the middle, sometimes just a small break every hour, on the hour. Sometimes the same teacher for all 4 hours, sometimes half and half. Right now the problem with the ground school that I have, is that sometimes we seem to be getting repeat information.

One instructor is responsible for a certain subject, and then another instructor will assume we know what he's talking about. I have noticed that there seems to be a lack of coordination between the instructors. Sometimes I hear the same thing, four different ways. Sometimes, I don't even hear about a subject, and then I'm given homework on it, or even tested on it.

Example- yesterday we had a class on the AIM. Our instructor gave us a lecture aided by a projector slide show. After that, we were given some worksheets to go over the material we supposedly just went over. There were questions on the worksheet that we did not cover. It is really frustrating when your scored on something they don't teach you. I understand that some of this is expected of us to learn on our own. I just thought this was a little bit extreme.

This doesn't mean the instructors aren't good instructors, but I think that having multiple people essentially doing the same instruction, is a waste of all of our time. Sometimes I think a reading assignment would be more productive.

So in summation, my overall opinion of the groundschool thus far, use it for a question/answer session. I haven't yet, but I think I will start reading the entire lesson the day before. You know exactly what lesson they will be teaching that day. I think it would be a good idea to read all you can on the subjects, do any assignments possible, and take to class any questions you have. It's my opinion that you can't count on the class instruction for actual instruction.

Take my word however, with this knowledge I have now about the ground school, I would still choose this school. You have to remember, this place still is one of the best schools you can go. There are some things that this place definitely excels at. You can't get this anywhere else as far as I'm concerned.

A lot of people, including myself, had to cancel flights due to weather. We're getting the outlying bands of hurricane Rita. Mainly causing gusty winds, and rain.

Hopefully it will clear up soon.

Well I had my first Vero Beach flight today.

It wasn't a lesson, but more of an introduction to the area, the different practice areas, and some of the procedures here. We went around the area, and pretty much did a big circle around the airport, and then did some touch and goes.

* I have removed this pictures due to bandwith issues *

Now it's time to study for class later today.

I have taken and passed my first written test in Private ground school. This isn't the FAA written, just a small portion of questions on aerodynamics, systems, and FAR's. I didn't pass with as good of a score as I thought I would have. Which indicates I don't know as much as I thought :p

So in light of that result, more studying for me. Today after our test we moved into performance theory. Pretty simple stuff, but I have some homework to look over and complete. I'm again confident in my knowledge of this subject matter, but I don't want to be too confident. Just because I know some of the numbers, and some of the terms, I think that is fooling me into thinking I'm an expert. I don't know. I'm really just bummed that someone with my experience didn't ace the test.

Oh well, with time I'm sure.