Learning to fly, or thinking of learning? Post your questions, comments and experiences here

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By T6Harvard
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1783456
Hope it's OK to give a shout out to Irv Lee for his Zoom training sessions on Comms last week. We did 4 seperate hours over 2 days.

As a complete beginner I found it extremely useful. The pre-reading and all the slides in advance gave me chance to get my head round most aspects so when it was live I could keep up! The pace was just right for me, and it was easy to ask questions as we went along. There were several times when Irv clarified things in a much better way than anything I'd previously read.

Learning, for me, requires the message to be imbibed at least twice before my brain accepts that it is true. Hence reading first then listening worked well.

We covered a lot, as you'd expect, and afterwards I felt that there was a reasonable chance that I would be able to make the right calls and understand what was said to me, after more practice, of course!

How to test the learning outcomes? I signed up for Air Quiz. Without further revision I have just done two sets of 20 questions. Scored 80%* and 85%.
(I was bamboozled by a question about a boat on fire and whether to call a Mayday or a Pan but on checking apparently 46% of Air Quizers got that one wrong, too ! )

I have no other course to compare it to but it suited me. The only thing I missed was meeting other students and sharing experiences over coffee on arrival. As a beginner that would have helped, I think, but atm we can't really do that.

ETA * I think that should have been 85%, depends how the following should in fact be said..... 123.50 MHz. My money is on 'wun too tree deysimal fife zero'. What say you?
My understanding is that you only drop post decimal zeros if they are the LAST TWO digits?
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By Irv Lee
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1783476
Thanks for the review, it seems everyone was pleased with it. Just by coincidence, not forced, both courses done so far have had a brand new student with just a trial lesson or similar, students mid flying licence course, a fully qualified ppl wanting to be better, and a foreign pilot needing UK radio and airspace knowledge to get an easa validation signed off
T6Harvard wrote:My understanding is that you only drop post decimal zeros if they are the LAST TWO digits?

You have got the learning point from the course 100% correct but you are being confused by an invented question.
Remember in practice, no atsu ( ;-) ) or official document should ever have given you nnn.nn to have to decide.
If say an AGCS ( ;-) ) said it to you then you could correct them as they should never have said 2 decimal places.
So presumably if they said (say) 125,25, to you, you could virtually slap them on the wrists by asking them to confirm they should have said 125.250 then when they mutter Affirm you now know the correct answer to that example. Make sure you are not the next person in that aircraft to land at the agsc field.... ;-) so if they said 123.50 you could ask to confirm they meant 123.500 (it could be 123.505 and a glitch dropped the final 5) then when they teply one of 123.500 or 123.505 you could then answer as trained!
So the question you were asked should have an option of "this is a poor question" as an optional answer. I would assume 123.50 was written before it was possible to be 123.505 and the frequency was really 123.500 so you (in that scene set badly by the question) could answer 123.5)
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