Preflight

Occasionally, cutting corners is good

And even then, the corner must be cut properly. Do you have a logbook endorsement that will allow you, as a student pilot, to fly in that airspace? On my long solo cross-country--back when the flight really was long--a friendly Philadelphia controller invited me to transition the Philadelphia Class B airspace, offering a nice shortcut toward my next destination. Unfortunately, I had to decline. My Class B endorsement was only good for the Baltimore-Washington Class B airspace.

Besides, it turns out that "Secret Shortcuts" is a more appropriate description. The shortcuts I want to mention will take you directly to some very useful resources on AOPA Flight Training Online. (These are good shortcuts, like the unsolicited Class B transition--except no logbook endorsements are necessary.) Why are they secret? Many of them are new, and you may be new to the magazine since we last discussed others.

Many universal resource locators or URLs--Web page addresses--are very long. Others are unintuitive or hard to remember. Plenty are both. But we've built some shortcuts into AOPA Flight Training Online (http://flighttraining.aopa.org); the shortcut for the Flight Training home page is the shorter and easier-to-remember ft.aopa.org.

In the same vein:

• ft.aopa.org/archives will take you to the online archives for AOPA Flight Training magazine. I regularly hear from readers who opine, "I wish that back issues of the magazine were available on the Web." They're out there--you can search for a particular subject or keyword, or browse an index of issues by month and year. The archive is complete through 1994, and partial issues are available as far back as 1990.
• ft.aopa.org/student will take you to an index of supplemental information and flight-training resources arranged by stage of flight training. Are you in the early stage of your training, still anticipating that unforgettable first solo flight? Have you already soloed, but you're still expanding your flight envelope? Perhaps you're struggling to master turns around a point or other training maneuvers, or you're puzzled by cross-country navigation, or you're in the final stages of preparation for your checkride--wherever you are in your primary training, we've got you covered.
• ft.aopa.org/library is a shortcut to a current online copy of the federal aviation regulations, the FAA's Aeronautical Information Manual, AOPA's Handbook for Pilots, and the National Aeronautical Charting Office's Aeronautical Chart User's Guide. This link will also take you to a variety of forms and other resources.
• ft.aopa.org/flightbag is your gateway to a variety of free flight-planning resources, including online weather from Meteorlogix; AOPA's Airport Directory Online, taxi diagrams for every public-use airport with a control tower; notices to airmen and information on temporary flight restrictions (TFRs); and AOPA's Real-Time Flight Planner. The latter is especially popular with flight instructors, because it provides an accurate and nearly instantaneous validation of a student's flight-plan calculations--with the added benefit that it depicts current and anticipated TFRs. As a student pilot, you do have to learn how to perform flight-planning calculations manually--but there's no reason why you can't check your own work using this powerful tool.
• ft.aopa.org/medical takes you to a comprehensive guide to pilot medical certification, as well as a database of aviation medical examiners and TurboMedical, AOPA's free online tool to help you prepare for your flight physical.
• ft.aopa.org/ask is the place to go if a question pops up between flight lessons and you just can't find the answer, or if you have a training-related question that you're not comfortable asking your flight instructor. Here, you can e-mail one of the experts in AOPA's Pilot Information Center. All of these people are experienced pilots--and most are flight instructors, as well.
• ft.aopa.org/links offers you one-click access to any Web site referenced in the magazine. For example, in this issue's "Industry Seal of Approval" (p. 42) there's a list of 22 institutions of higher learning that have been accredited by the Council on Aviation Accreditation. Want to visit the Web site for one of them, or all of them? Go to the Links page, click on the URL for the desired school, and you're there--no need to type in, or even remember, a long or unwieldy address.

We hope these shortcuts will enable you to more quickly find the information you need on our Web site, so that you can spend less time looking and more time flying. Please let us know if you find them helpful.