I recently discovered that there is a flying club that operates out of Buttonville. According to their website they have over 100 members.

The membership fee is $30 (for students) for a year. This club does a lot of trips, some of the bigger trips on the list for this year:

Apr 4-10 – Sun ‘n Fun in Lakeland Florida

May 12-14 – Washington, DC. Visit the Smithsonian museum and sight see the U.S Capital to be preceded the week before by a meeting on procedures if required by first timers or VFR …

The Weather Network has launched a new product called “Hourly Forecasts”. They forecast the weather for the next 12 hours, hour by hour.

I don’t know how accurate these forecasts are.. however they could prove to be useful for flying. If you know you are only going to be flying for a part of the day (ie, doing circuits for a couple of hours) then you can use these forecasts to see how the weather will be like for that part of the day.

The forecast is limited however. The most detail …

I’ve registered for my summer semester courses last night. They start in the second week of May and run until August.

Tuesdays: Instruments and Avionics

Wednesdays: Navigation

Thursdays: Personnel Management

I was hoping that four courses would be offered, however, this schedule good (especially for the summer) as it gives me Mondays and Fridays off.

I haven’t been able to study for the PSTAR test at all. I really want to get it out of the way so that I can solo as soon as possible. I have, however, been studying my emergency checklists.

As part …

I found out on Monday that I passed my radio exam… no surprise there. Just studying now for the PSTAR test.

My lesson on Monday went well. It was windy so excellent circuit practice in wind. Lots of Touch-And-Gos. I still can’t get the hang of the flair on landing though. My FI blames the lack of practice in calm weather. All of my circuit practice has been in windy conditions. Every time i’ve gone up for circuits, we’ve had a runway change. Monday was no exception. This time it was …

Was finally able to go flying today. Winds were gusty, but still ok for doing circuits. I decided to bring along my scanner this time and record ground and tower.

My first call for this lesson didn’t go too well. Listen to the clip and see if you can spot the TWO things I did incorrectly (leave a comment).

Listen to whoops.mp3

(And yes, ground was barely understandable.. but I understood what he was saying)

The latest episode of Mythbusters tackles the myth of cell phones on airplanes. Their experiment was done two different ways.

First they purchased a bunch of equipment, radio stacks, VOR/NDB radios, GPSs and got it working. They then tested the equipment by tuning it to an airport VOR (San Francisco, which was 10miles away).

During the entire experiment, they were trying to determine if a cell phone can cause interference with the VOR equipment. Either by deflecting the needle, or flipping the to/from flag.

Take a look at how VORs work at Wikipedia!

Through …

No flying today because of thunderstorms. The upside though is that I have yet another METAR I can use to test my METAR parsning engine that I wrote for my Computer Systems class. This SPECI is particularly interesting:

SPECI CYKZ 131233Z 09011G16KT 2 1/4SM -TSRA BR BKN006 OVC012CB RERA RMK SC6CB2 CB N MOVG E OCNL LTGICCG N=

Trying to figure out the Remarks section…

Stratus Cumulus 6/8

Cumulonimbus 2/8

Cumulonumbus North of field, moving East.

Occasional Ligtniging in cloud North of field.

This is also a good day to study for the PSTAR too.

To answer a …

I will probably find out how I did on the Radio Exam come Monday. In the meantime I’ve been studying for the PSTAR test. The passing grade for this test is 90% and its your ticket to getting your Training License (read: fly solo).

Subject areas include:

- Canadian Aviation Regulations (CARs)

- Air Traffic Control Clearances and Instructions

- Air Traffic Control procedures as they apply to the control of VFR traffic

- Air Traffic procedures at uncontrolled airports and aerodromes

- Special VFR Regulations

- Aeronautical Information Circulars

- NOTAM

This exam only covers air regulations, rules, …

A plane needs air to be able to fly. Thanks to the laws of physics, the same parcel of air can have different characteristics based on temperature and altitude. Because of this, there are a few things we have to be careful of while trying to keep that hunk of metal afloat.

Let’s take a look at some fundamental “laws” of air (and all gases for that matter), as they apply to flying:

- As altitude increases, air pressure decreases

- As air temperature increases, air pressure decreases (Gay-Lussac’s law)

- As relative humidity …

I did better than expected on my Meterology midterm: 81%. Most of my mistakes were due to stupidity (ie, not reading the question properly).

I also took care of the Radio Operators test on the weekend. The massing mark is 70%. It comprised of 30 multiple choice questions and 10 short answer questions. Pretty straight forward. The short answer questions involved spelling out words using the phonetic alphabet (alpha,bravo,charlie,etc..) as well as making an Urgency (Mayday) and Priority (Pan Pan) calls and messages.

I always find it difficult to figure out when …