Day #8

Today we finished up principles of flight with talking about helicopters. This was a pretty humbling experience because I thought that I knew quite a bit about helicopters because of working out at the base but I was dead wrong. I had no idea about the different controls and how helicopters operating under such different circumstances. The lesson wasn't all completely knew stuff which made me feel a little better.

The next lesson was about wake turbulence.
As you can see from the picture wake turbulence is the air that rolls off the end of the wingtips and speeds up to disrupt the air all over the path of flight. The tube-like portions of wake turbulence that are directly off the wingtips are called vortices or wake vortex. We also discussed topics such as which type of configuration results in the greatest amount of wake turbulence and ways to adjust flight paths to avoid catastrophic accidents.

We finished up the day with aircraft recognition. This lesson will be pretty interesting since it is about learning what plane is what. We basically look at a bunch of pictures and see what specific characteristics stick out to help us identify each plane.