RoarkJr.
Well-Known Member
Hey everyone, the fat lady hath sung. I landed my forms solo Wednesday with about half an hour to spare to select this week. I will try to give what I feel like are the most useful nuggets of what I wish I had known or what my experience was for these last two stages.
Instruments was a total cluster for me in the beginning. I must be more of a "monkey skills" guy because I heard from a lot of people that it was their favorite stage, whereas for me it was the most difficult. I had three months to prepare for contacts but only three days to prepare for instruments and it showed. Ground school was difficult... I got the impression I was supposed to know a lot more than I did coming in. My understanding is that they are changing the syllabus soon, so hopefully it's a little better for you going in later. To offer perspective, I did not know what an "approach" was going in. I mean, we called ATC when we were "approaching" a VFR course rules checkpoint...why not call it a "controlled landing" or something instead? Yeah...
To mitigate that (if you're also a mouth breather), my recommendation is to have somebody who is instruments complete walk you through a flight. It's really not that bad when you think about it: you get your clearance, get handed off to various approaches and or centers if you are high enough, you get weather information for where you want to go, and then when you are with your destination approach you check in and request the approaches you want. You can expect radar vectors to final approach course unless you want something else for training, and you need to practice when they give you the final call for when you are cleared for the approach. Obviously you need to learn the approach plates, and the accompanying procedures for the various types of approaches, but the FTI lays those out reasonably well.
I ended up doing a cross country, and while it was very difficult doing three flights in a row (twice), I definitely recommend it for the experience. I had a blast with my friends but also got to mess up a lot in a lot of different places, which will hopefully pay off in the future, despite the pain in the present. Try not to get too hung up on things like I did, for example, you will probably fly VFR mostly while in instruments. This gives the instructors flexibility, but initially it was very confusing for me because, well, it's instruments, so why am I not filing IFR? It can all seem overwhelming at first, but just give it time. I will say this, if you can keep the plane at exactly the airspeed you want and exactly the altitude you want, the instructors will notice. I had to get lazy basic air work sort of beat out of me, but once it was I felt like a lot better of a pilot.
There are definitely differences between how you prepare for the simulators and how you prepare for real flights. I wish they didn't teach the classes the way they did, introducing the publications first, and then the approaches etc because it can lead you to believe that you are sitting there looking through the AP/1A before flights. Maybe later, but not Primary. For the simulators, prepare like the handout tells you to prepare and like ground school taught you to prepare with the jet logs and whatnot. For the flights in the local area, focus on weather, canned routes, and meeting your JPPT requirements. Go to the usual spots, get the gouge on which places have good food (and obviously have contract fuel). Try not to stress too bad about the checkride, the approaches aren't even graded.
Get gud with Foreflight...you can put in delays, holds, get suggested routes, jet log, all that jazz. Pretty nice. In terms of what straps to use I just used the regular leg strap that it came with. For my cross country I forgot my leg strap but it turns out that the case it comes with fits in your G suit strap. Also, bring your iPad in Forms, we shot an ILS back home once due to the rules being no-go from weather.
Forms was frustrating at first because I was scheduled for the class before I was even complete with instruments. So there I was, preparing for an instrument check while also trying to study my night VFR navigation, when I see that I am scheduled for a forms class knowing that I will also be expected to pass a test in 24 hours on an FTI I haven't read at all. Anyway, the gouge is good, make sure you get the "xerox" gouge and watch the driver videos. What I did was walk through a flight from walking into the FWOC to calling base once we got back on deck. I had the gouge videos, FTI, and FWOP all up and just filled in the flight from each source step by step. Chair/walk fly with your partner ASAP to get the signals and calls down. The brief is a bit of a monster, you just have to keep hitting it until you have it down. The flying part is an absolute blast and really not that difficult once you get the basics down.
I was fortunate to have some great friends, study partners, and instructors throughout primary. I selected jets Meridian and will probably start sometime early next year. If you have any questions at all shoot me a DM or post here, I got a lot of messages from the Contacts post and it's been great sharing experiences and gouge. Thanks Airwarriors!
Instruments was a total cluster for me in the beginning. I must be more of a "monkey skills" guy because I heard from a lot of people that it was their favorite stage, whereas for me it was the most difficult. I had three months to prepare for contacts but only three days to prepare for instruments and it showed. Ground school was difficult... I got the impression I was supposed to know a lot more than I did coming in. My understanding is that they are changing the syllabus soon, so hopefully it's a little better for you going in later. To offer perspective, I did not know what an "approach" was going in. I mean, we called ATC when we were "approaching" a VFR course rules checkpoint...why not call it a "controlled landing" or something instead? Yeah...
To mitigate that (if you're also a mouth breather), my recommendation is to have somebody who is instruments complete walk you through a flight. It's really not that bad when you think about it: you get your clearance, get handed off to various approaches and or centers if you are high enough, you get weather information for where you want to go, and then when you are with your destination approach you check in and request the approaches you want. You can expect radar vectors to final approach course unless you want something else for training, and you need to practice when they give you the final call for when you are cleared for the approach. Obviously you need to learn the approach plates, and the accompanying procedures for the various types of approaches, but the FTI lays those out reasonably well.
I ended up doing a cross country, and while it was very difficult doing three flights in a row (twice), I definitely recommend it for the experience. I had a blast with my friends but also got to mess up a lot in a lot of different places, which will hopefully pay off in the future, despite the pain in the present. Try not to get too hung up on things like I did, for example, you will probably fly VFR mostly while in instruments. This gives the instructors flexibility, but initially it was very confusing for me because, well, it's instruments, so why am I not filing IFR? It can all seem overwhelming at first, but just give it time. I will say this, if you can keep the plane at exactly the airspeed you want and exactly the altitude you want, the instructors will notice. I had to get lazy basic air work sort of beat out of me, but once it was I felt like a lot better of a pilot.
There are definitely differences between how you prepare for the simulators and how you prepare for real flights. I wish they didn't teach the classes the way they did, introducing the publications first, and then the approaches etc because it can lead you to believe that you are sitting there looking through the AP/1A before flights. Maybe later, but not Primary. For the simulators, prepare like the handout tells you to prepare and like ground school taught you to prepare with the jet logs and whatnot. For the flights in the local area, focus on weather, canned routes, and meeting your JPPT requirements. Go to the usual spots, get the gouge on which places have good food (and obviously have contract fuel). Try not to stress too bad about the checkride, the approaches aren't even graded.
Get gud with Foreflight...you can put in delays, holds, get suggested routes, jet log, all that jazz. Pretty nice. In terms of what straps to use I just used the regular leg strap that it came with. For my cross country I forgot my leg strap but it turns out that the case it comes with fits in your G suit strap. Also, bring your iPad in Forms, we shot an ILS back home once due to the rules being no-go from weather.
Forms was frustrating at first because I was scheduled for the class before I was even complete with instruments. So there I was, preparing for an instrument check while also trying to study my night VFR navigation, when I see that I am scheduled for a forms class knowing that I will also be expected to pass a test in 24 hours on an FTI I haven't read at all. Anyway, the gouge is good, make sure you get the "xerox" gouge and watch the driver videos. What I did was walk through a flight from walking into the FWOC to calling base once we got back on deck. I had the gouge videos, FTI, and FWOP all up and just filled in the flight from each source step by step. Chair/walk fly with your partner ASAP to get the signals and calls down. The brief is a bit of a monster, you just have to keep hitting it until you have it down. The flying part is an absolute blast and really not that difficult once you get the basics down.
I was fortunate to have some great friends, study partners, and instructors throughout primary. I selected jets Meridian and will probably start sometime early next year. If you have any questions at all shoot me a DM or post here, I got a lot of messages from the Contacts post and it's been great sharing experiences and gouge. Thanks Airwarriors!
