Day #11

For those of you who didn't hear, I didn't have school on Monday and Tuesday due to the crazy ice storm. I watched the weather reports on Sunday and they said it would probably be bad but I really didn't know what to expect so I didn't pay much attention. To my surprise on Monday I had 1/2 inch of solid ice covering the entire car and everything else. The sidewalks, parking lots, absolutely everything was covered and there wasn't anything that anyone could do about it. It took me around 20 mins to finally get the ice melted enough to scrap it off and see out the windows so I could park in the covered parking (I know that I should have done this to begin with but I wasn't thinking). On Tuesday everyone else got around another inch of ice which made things even worse.

On Wednesday I thought that the FAA would cancel classes again but they ended up having them because the course is already so condensed. Luckily my instructors are going to be able to catch us up without having to come in on Saturdays or pushing back graduation a couple of days.

As for the material that was covered on Wednesday, it included finishing up basic navigation (latitude/longitude, great circle routes, effects of wind on flight, and effects of altitude and temperature on speed) and also finishing radio/satellite navigation. The radio/satellite navigation lesson was pretty interesting because we started to discuss about the ground based transmitters that are located throughout the country and serve as the backbone to the national airspace system. Basically these different types of transmitters are on the ground and send up various types of signals and voice recordings. The planes then use these transmitters as waypoints to help them navigate through the sky. Some of the types of transmitters were confusing since a lot of it is the same just a little bit different. For example a basic transmitter is called a VOR and the military uses something very similar but it is called a TACAN, then to make it a little more confusing the FAA decided to combine the two with a few extras into a VORTAC. Here is a basic picture of a VORTAC, for some reason when I post pictures it doesn't fit them into the space right, if you click on the picture it will take you to the website that I found it on. Overall I thought it was okay, I just know that I'll have to study this a bit.