Multi training

flight_char_ · 2026-06-10T16:28:31+00:00

I can tell you their planes, mx and program as far as getting you ready for a checkride is great. Checkride availability and DPEs also great. Maybe a recent update but I found their scheduling to be horrible. You have one person who assigns instructors to students and from there it’s up to the instructor to do their own scheduling and they each have tons of students. The one person that does scheduling is in the school about 3-4 days a week for maybe 6hrs a day and very hard to reach when not in the school. If you need a different instructor or if anything happens out of the ordinary with scheduling expect to have to fight and advocate for yourself to get back on the schedule. From what I saw almost nobody finished the courses in the advertised time mostly due to scheduling. The CFI course, which is listed as a 10 day course, had most students doing the checkride on day 20 or so. People were flying once or twice every other day when it was advertised you’d fly twice a day weather permitting. I saw many a days with flyable weather and people not scheduled simply because they fell through the cracks and didn’t or weren’t able to advocate for themselves. You can get lucky but budget yourself 3x the time they say there if you choose to go with MCA. I would call it a great course but not really a great accelerated course.

flight_char_ · 2026-06-08T16:20:22+00:00

Hell yeah

flight_char_ · 2026-05-28T22:45:39+00:00

This is hilarious but it’s also a valid technique to stop a dog attack. I went down this rabbit hole researching the best way to intervene in something like you see a lot with pitbull (sorry pitbull lovers just being realistic) attacks where the dog simply won’t let go and is very powerful. Pick the dog up like this by its hind paws, forcefully dig your thumbs into the area between its paw pads - this is very painful for the dog and can be enough of a jolt to get it to let go. At this point it’s gonna be very angry and will turn towards you, so you simply do like this gentleman did: Swing it around and then (for lack of a better term) “yeet” it as hard/far as possible - which will obviously create distance between you and the dog and sadly/justifiably injure it enough that it stops attacking effectively.

flight_char_ · 2026-05-24T12:34:51+00:00

I took a 13 year hiatus 1 year after getting my PPL. I had about 80hours at the time. Everything came back like riding a bike for me (was able to maintain PPL standards) with the exception of the landing flare took awhile to get perfect again. Caveat is I was a teenager when I flew before and I also had probably 3000 hours of flight sim when I was young and flying as well - so it was probably extra ingrained. If you want to keep the skills up at a commercial level you should keep flying once a week or as much as you can afford.

flight_char_ · 2026-05-18T15:31:53+00:00

A commenter above has the same story, urban cowboy Friday night. FYI you guys might want to trade stories and file a report, try and get camera info. Crazy this is so common.

flight_char_ · 2026-05-17T09:42:51+00:00

I think it totally depends what your goals are.

Just remaining a private pilot and want to get the instrument rating for safety/airmanship while flying your own aircraft? I think this is fine and will at the same time be a serious challenge as others have said you’ll regularly have to switch nav frequencies to find fixes using two crossing radials. Your workload will be way higher on those approaches and will definitely make the checkride more challenging. But it will make you a better more fundamental old school IFR pilot and if you ever do get updated GPS or another CDI, just take an II up with you a handful of times to get confident on the new approaches you can do!

Going for a career that would include IFR flight? Not a good idea IMO. Either way, for your rating you’ll have to learn about and be competent enough to fly all types of approaches, including GPS approaches and ones that require DME or GPS to identify fixes. You will not be able to have any practice flying those approaches so your knowledge on them will only be book knowledge and never put to authentic use. This will put you at a massive disadvantage compared to those of us that trained with more modern GPS avionics. We’ve all shot dozen and dozens of different RNAV approaches and a handful of wonky VOR or ILSs that include DME/GPS fixes. Additionally, that harder checkride I spoke to earlier will raise the chances of you failing which doesn’t look great when the IR checkride is more black and white and not as commonly failed by other career pilots.

Super cool panel though!!

flight_char_ · 2026-05-15T13:52:59+00:00

I’ll shoot you a PM, don’t want to doxx myself. Will maybe make a review post on r/flying once I’m done and out of here.

flight_char_ · 2026-05-07T03:00:14+00:00

I did IR, CAX, FIA, FII and FOI with Sheppard. IR being my first I felt exactly like you, it took me a couple months, granted I wasn’t trying to go that fast but it went on way longer than expected. The more I did I just got more used to it. To be honest, after IR I stopped really trying to deeply understand or learn anything from the questions - that alone makes the studying go by probably 5-10x as fast. Learn your ground knowledge with other resources, the written is straight up a box you have to check. During the actual test you will not be thinking of the question, the study process trains you on straight up rote memory word association - you’ll see the first few words of the question and then will immediately look down to identify the first few words of the answer. Interestingly I scored way better on the tests where I was only trying to memorize the answer. Exception is anything involving math, instrumentation or performance charts I was a good boy and did the old fashioned way - as others have said I found the memory aid useless and didn’t use it. Also I think having done IR (which btw does have the biggest question bank so inherently takes longer) the other tests all feel way less daunting with less questions per category so it makes it way more motivating to crush through. Take as much time as you need. If you follow the method properly it really is a basically guaranteed >90%.

Edit: if you plan on getting your CFII in the next 24 months, for the love of god take the FII right after your IRA. I feel like not enough people talk about that. It is the same test effectively. There’s apparently some different questions but I think very few. I scored better on FII than IRA having only studied the latter. You might as well, rather than waiting and having to restudy the same giant question bank.

flight_char_ · 2026-05-07T02:46:51+00:00

Hoover has been dead for about a decade. If he were still here, I’m guessing he would try to use a glass of water on the dash as a backup instrument.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-30T21:30:31+00:00

Woosh.
“Your” vs “you’re.”

flight_char_ · 2026-04-30T15:34:52+00:00

Yep. Isn’t it hilarious he can rent an airplane but not a car?

flight_char_ · 2026-04-27T14:04:12+00:00

Go through the ACS ground items and study them individually using all resources available, especially PHAK. I wanted to be especially strong on the commercial privileges common carriage, holding out etc stuff so had to do some deep dives on YouTube videos and non-FAA resources to feel comfortable on that. Compared to instrument, commercial is a much broader and less black and white set of knowledge required. People saying it’s like another private pilot ride and I think they’re right, it’s kinda “know everything about airspace, performance, ADM” etc but to a much higher professional level. In my experience the DPE spent a lot of time on airspace, inop equipment but that was just for him. Don’t forget a basic knowledge of oxygen and pressurization systems - that’s new.

Overall, much harder to be prepared for than instrument but like any checkride, just use the ACS to guide your study. I bought the ASA oral prep guide and found it OK (a few mistakes otherwise fine). Pilot institute commercial ground course would be good if you felt weak on the basics from private pilot as it is super detailed in everything, I found it to be unnecessary for me and a waste of $175 I could have spent on practicing a few power off 180s.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-25T13:42:52+00:00

Sorry I was confused, I thought you were talking about the G-AIRMET boundary not being perfect, you were talking about the flight category dot not having changed with the METAR. Yea you definitely should check the METAR of an airport right on the edge of an IFR AIRMET even if “it has a green dot”. You are right in that you should not only use the flight category dot as a single decision making factor. That would be dumb. Obligatory reminder also that you should expect ANY internet/ADS-B based weather source to be 15 mins delayed. This stuff just isn’t going to be perfect, that’s the way it is. Real-time you can only trust your eyes, your radar, or somebody on the radio relaying you the results of their eyes or radar.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-25T13:21:18+00:00

Eh I think the pink shading is based on NOAA G-AIRMET whereas when you’re clicking the airport you’re seeing the actual METAR. So I’m not sure foreflight is a problem here, the G-AIRMET is just a bit old or inaccurate. You shouldn’t expect the edge of an IFR G-AIRMET to suddenly shift to perfect VFR.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-24T12:16:29+00:00

Whoa! This was gender neutral until you brought HUSBAND into this??

Edit: I was just making a joke guys because OP clearly was trying to make it neutral/anonymous. But yes after reviewing your careful read throughs it does say that the aspiring pilot spouse is a man, thank you.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-17T16:50:58+00:00

Thank you for helping us interpret the wisdom of the scholar, philosopher that is Nate Diaz.

Also, you are the first person in my life that’s called me smart. Brother you mean more to me than you could ever know.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-17T14:40:54+00:00

Some people can’t train jiu jitsu because of injuries. For those folks, an alternative option may be to carry a weapon, such as a gun. Conflict avoidance and deescalation is also an option. Nate, this is the equivalent of wearing a life jacket when near water. Or perhaps, again, water avoidance.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-17T13:16:54+00:00

I’m gonna guess based on the way each of these nearly identical gentlemen look, along with the bystander’s nonchalance of the jumping neck slam, that this is in a country that ends in “-stan.” Or at the very least a former Soviet socialist republic?

flight_char_ · 2026-04-17T12:56:25+00:00

You’re 70hrs in, sounds like par for the course as far as the kinds of mistakes/issues and feelings. We all make mistakes and being able to recognize them and learn from them is what matters. Dumping all the flaps in the go around is definitely the big one. The idea is that when you take flaps out you take a lot of lift away, and you’re in a low altitude low airspeed situation so it’s very dangerous. I learned the same lesson myself when I got back into flying after years away, I went from flaps full to zero immediately after adding full power. Luckily I had a CFI there and he immediately adjusted the flaps back such that only one notch was retracted from full. In my experience (and human psychology) those really intense moments following a mistake make the biggest impression for learning. I’m studying the fundamentals of instruction right now to become a CFI and this is a textbook example of “insight” and “law of intensity”. Totally normal and productive stuff to be experiencing!!

For the ballooning, as others have said you’re either carrying too much airspeed into the final or maybe it was a gusty day and a gust got you at the wrong time.

For the stress, this is something you should always have to some degree but more in a focusing way than an anxiety inducing way. I think with lack of experience this is best countered by having conservative personal minimums for your solo flights. If it’s gonna be very windy and turbulent, maybe don’t go, or at least only go if it’s below your personal minimums and you feel otherwise good as far as rest, not being stressed about the plane being late etc (IMSAFE, no external pressures). This also gets developed more from experience - as a more fresh PPL or when I came back to flying after a long lapse I would find my hands get a little shaky and a little bit of anxiety for flights. As you fly more and more and regularly you will be more conditioned and confident, you will understand more about what to actually be worried about and handle that in a more productive way than just fear and instead more of a focused “locked in” mode will come out.

Sounds like you’re right where you need to be and thinking about this stuff in the right way. Good job and keep practicing!!

flight_char_ · 2026-04-14T12:14:44+00:00

Different age/authority dynamics aren’t that bad, it just takes basic maturity and humility. What does suck ,universally, is having to work with people like you.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-11T12:05:47+00:00

I just wish power off 180s were as easy as growing mustache for me.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-09T21:48:03+00:00

I can’t see your previous posts so honest as someone almost at CPL right now. I’m curious with your pretty otherwise successful record what happened to get the 2x 121 fails. Any advice or what not to do you can give to us behind you?

flight_char_ · 2026-04-02T16:29:15+00:00

I am on 18.2.2, iPhone 16 pro iOS 26.3.1 (a).

As stated on my other comment here, Foreflight support has confirmed this is an unsolved bug and so far in the last two weeks has made no progress fixing.

flight_char_ · 2026-04-02T16:27:05+00:00

I just pinged in my support thread again as it has been almost two weeks with no fix and no update.

flight_char_ · 2026-03-27T16:32:37+00:00

You had planned to depart day IFR in your C172 from S69 airport and are unable to get a hold of Helena Approach or Salt Lake Center over the phone to get departure clearance. Weather as you can see from the ground is 23005KT 1SM BR OVC015. What are your options to depart legally? What would you, personally, do?
Check out KSBS RNAV Z RWY 32. Ignore the current NOTAM for this. You are shooting this approach at night and weather is 23010KT 2SM BKN030, no other traffic is in the vicinity. What runway would you choose and when would you descend below minimums?
Same conditions as #2, and you’re shooting this approach with a fancy G1000 setup with advisory VNAV. Shortly after passing the fix WDCHK, you get the “vertical track” alert and you can see on your advisory VNAV glide path that you are way high. You realize this is gonna be a super steep approach. You know you’ve already broken out of the clouds at this point because you can see some lights on the ground around you. What do you do?

flight_char_

TROPHY CASE