School News
Meet Capt. Jepp
The man behind the charts
By Julie Summers Walker
Today’s pilots know the name Jeppesen from charts and flight training products, but they might not realize all pilots owe a debt to the man who pioneered accurate aviation navigation aids.
When Elrey Borge Jeppesen was a mail pilot in the 1930s, aviators used Rand McNally road maps to help them find their way. But road maps were designed for people who never left the ground. Jeppesen began compiling notes about every airport he visited, highlighting landmarks, elevations of obstructions, and airport runway information.
When several of his pilot friends expressed interest in getting a copy of his notes, Jeppesen printed copies of the material and sold them for $10. He flew professionally for decades while producing charts on the side, but stopped flying for the airlines in 1954 to concentrate on the chart business. The business he founded in his basement still bears his name, and Jeppesen, now a subsidiary of the Boeing Co., provides navigational charting and electronic computerized aids for pilots around the world.
Stories such as this can be found in Freedom to Fly: The Story of General Aviation in America celebrating the eightieth anniversary of AOPA, written by AOPA writers, now available for $39.95.
New scholarship program from CAU
So you want to be a professional pilot?
The dream of becoming a professional pilot and earning an aviation degree can come true with the Dreams Take Flight Scholarship, which can cover the tuition and fees associated with California Aeronautical University’s Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics degree. Awarded to one current high school senior, the scholarship award amount is up to $150,000.
As a strong advocate of aviation, CAU invests in the future of the aviation industry as it strives to introduce younger generations to the rewarding and achievable careers available in the aeronautical industry. The Dreams Take Flight Scholarship aligns with the university’s mission to promote aviation across the country.
“With the Dreams Take Flight Scholarship, we want to engage high school students and high school counselors in ways that bring aviation careers to the forefront,” said Matthew Johnston, CAU president. “We hope that this opportunity will show that becoming a professional pilot is within reach and not just a dream anymore.”
Eligible scholarship recipients must be a current high school senior, have a minimum GPA of 2.5, provide two letters of recommendation, and submit a personal statement in the form of an essay or video. Students also must meet the admissions requirements for the professional pilot degree program described in the university’s catalog. The award recipient will be chosen based on personal goals, academic interest, and merit.
The scholarship application can be found online. The application deadline is March 31, 2019, and the scholarship winner will be announced June 10, 2019.
www.calaero.edu/dreamstakeflight
INDUSTRY NEWS
Acting class
Try out scenarios in this new course
Pilots love to extract wisdom from a particularly challenging flight or advance their proficiency by comparing their decision making with their peers and the pros. Exploring such questions is what scenario-based learning is all about: It offers a practical approach to learning by applying a set of facts and circumstances to a hypothetical flight set in a real-world flying environment, challenging you to apply your knowledge and experience to making good piloting decisions under the stated conditions.
A new product release from PilotWorkshops, the Nashua, New Hampshire-based online proficiency training organization and an AOPA Premier Partner, takes that approach a serious step further each month by giving pilots a way to play out a flight scenario to its conclusion, learn from experts, and share ideas with a community of fellow pilots. The new release is VFR Mastery, a series of online, scenario-based workshops that test your knowledge and hone your decision-making skills.
Available as a month-to-month subscription, the VFR Mastery series of workshops can be run on Windows PCs, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android devices, and is a natural follow-on to the PilotWorkshops IFR Mastery series, said company founder Mark Robidoux. The IFR Mastery series launched in 2010 and recently published its ninety-eighth scenario for the thousands of pilots who are members.
On completion of the scenario a participant also is eligible for credit under the FAA’s Pilot Proficiency Wings program.
Sporty’s courses go Android
Android users rejoice! Sportys Pilot Shop is rolling out its popular learn to fly courses on the platform, one of many recent updates to the course software.
The courses include a slew of new features, including detailed analytics in the written exam test prep section, video search, and hyperlinked study resources. With these features, students can go straight from study questions to the original source material, take tests tailored to their weak areas, and find out exactly how prepared they are for the written exam.
There are also a host of new tools for flight instructors. Instructors will be able to see where in the course the student is studying, assign homework remotely, and see test progress.
But the biggest advance is the availability on Android, a platform both new and current customers will automatically have access to. Although the Android version isn’t yet as feature-rich as the Apple or online versions, video can be streamed or downloaded for offline viewing, and more features are being added all the time.
Sporty’s learn to fly course and instrument courses are each $199.99 for lifetime access across all available platforms.
ASI NEWS
Relationship management
When your CFI is also your parent
By Bob Knill
Much of learning to fly an airplane is learning how to manage energy. For example, during a soft-field takeoff, you learn how to control the amount of lift you create in ground effect until you achieve a certain climb speed.
But there’s more to learning to fly than just managing an airplane’s energy. You also must manage relationships. With every lesson, you’re building a relationship with your instructor. You’re trusting them to teach you the right information at the right time, and they’re trusting you for honest, open feedback on your grasp of the lesson. At times your instructor needs to be a strict disciplinarian, and calm and detached other times. Students need to be open to criticism, vulnerable, strong-willed, and vocal. The challenge is knowing which hat to wear at the appropriate time.
But when the instructor/student relationship is also the parent/child relationship, the challenge of managing that relationship becomes more complex. The parent flight instructor who teaches their son or daughter to fly leads to an especially challenging (and extremely rewarding) relationship. The challenge for the parent/CFI is knowing when to take the parent hat off and put the CFI hat on, and vice versa.
Parents have been teaching their children to fly and handing down the passion for aviation since the early days of flight. Moreso than the typical CFI/student relationship, parents who teach their children to fly create a rare bond that sticks with their children for generations.
During Episode 8 of the There I Was… podcast, country music legend Aaron Tippin and Richard McSpadden, executive director of the AOPA Air Safety Institute, discuss the parent/child, CFI/student relationship. Both Tippin and McSpadden are teaching their children to fly, and they talk about some of the struggles, and joys, that balancing those relationships entail.
www.airsafetyinstitute.org/thereiwas
Bob Knill is a writer on assignment with the AOPA Air Safety Institute
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