I thought it was about time to give an update to my training.  I deferred entry into the Doctor of Education program at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in order to focus more brainpower on flight training.  I surpassed 100 hours of flight time a couple of weeks ago and have been hitting the books pretty hard.  I am concurrently attending Commercial Rating Ground School (for a Commercial Pilot’s License) and training for the Instrument Rating.  As this point in training, I am doing all of my flying in a PCATD (Personal Computer Aircraft Training Device – fancy FAA name for a glorified flight simulator which doesn’t have graphics as nice as Microsoft Flight Simulator).  I have around 8 hours in the “sim” and can count a total of 10 hours towards the training requirements for the rating.

However, the Instrument Rating is very technical and my brain hurts after every training session as we discuss timed-turns, holds, including parallel, direct and teardrop entry into holds, approaches, missed approaches, etc…  If this sounds like Greek, it did to me too a few weeks ago, but I have been reading a ton and studying, studying, studying.

In a couple more weeks, we will fly an actual plane again, but there is so much of a technical learning curve, the computer is the best place to learn versus trying to fly an airplane while multitasking at this level of my training.