No flying this week as the weather kept me firmly on the ground. As we move out of Winter and into Spring the weather patterns also begin to shift, which has caused a fairly wet week with plenty of cloud about the ranges, making it very difficult for me to get out on my last solo nav. We tried and tried but the weather just wasn’t letting up, so instead the week was spent mostly preparing for the ground school part of the PPL flight exam, brushing up on the relevant CAO‘s, CAAP‘s and other components outlined in the Manual of Standards. There are also KDR‘s which must be completed, these are the parts of the theory exam that you got wrong and so you will have an oral examination on these topics as part of the big test in the ground school part.
The good thing is the KDR‘s have a MOS reference so you can easily look it up online, and most of the time you will probably remember what question you had and what you got wrong. As for the CAO‘s and other regulations, I would say get your hands on them and get familiar, the sooner the better because they are handy in the PPL theory exam too, and they are a lot more tricky to find information on than say the ERSA or AIP. There is no way you could learn and memorise the entire contents as they are huge documents, but creating a mental mind map of what area corresponds to what regulation will help a lot, for example emergency equipment is CAO 20.11. I use flashcards to both recall what CAO 20.11 is and then flip them over to recall what regulation applies to emergency equipment, do this for just 5 minutes a day and you will build up the map pretty quick.
There are a million and one ways to learn, study and build memory. I’m no expert and what works for me might not work for you, I find recalling information is the best way for me to commit it to long term memory, and flash cards help with that a lot. That’s all for this week, it looks like there should be a few gaps in the weather so I should get some flights in soon fingers crossed.
