Learning to fly

(Extracted from http://wiki.mindcloud.org/wiki/Learning_to_fly ;-D)

To start with, here are some useful links that I've encountered in my journeys of information acquisition:

Informations

Learning to Fly by Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper: a beginner's introduction to what it means to be a pilot, 1916-style! Reasonably relevant and at least an interesting and amusing read. Out of copyright and brought to you by Project Gutenberg.

Stoenworks Aviation Pages: Many interesting articles, stories and tutorials on a range of aviation topics. Much of it can be applied to simulated flight - I found these pages a very useful in learning my way around the cockpit and about flying in general. The author has a lovely writing style, but this is just icing on the cake.

Choosing the Right Flying School: an rather frank article about the costs and pressures in flight training, and good approaches to organising training.

Civil Aviation Safety Authority - Pilot Guides: a selection of useful documents from CASA. The Pilot Careers Booklet is helpful in getting a good overview of the process and becoming more excited about the whole thing. The Flight Instructor Guide is a handy syllabus that could be useful in preparing for training exercises. The VFR Guide is a tome of information, could be extremely useful in understanding how the law and operations fit together.

King Schools: producers of many educational videos related to flying. The videos are a little corny but make for informative viewing. Use your imagination to find a way to obtain a set, if you can't afford the rather steep price.

Ask the Pilot: a regular column aimed at the general public, from the perspective of an airline pilot. Articles cover such things as security theatre, the nature of the airline industry, aviation accidents, aviation history, aircraft aesthetics and there's a fair bit of answering of reader questions. Often quite ranty - browse the archive for interesting-sounding articles.

Austin's Adventures at X-plane.com: Several excited rants by the chief creator of the flight simulator X-plane. Some of these are hilarious, others have the tone of an insane wealthy person complaining about things...also hilarious. More importantly, most of them are interesting!

My Flight Training Blog: the personal blog of a UniSA Aviation Academy student, detailing their progress through, and thoughts on the training they have been undertaking.

My Life and Air Traffic Control: the blog of an air traffic controller based in Australia...it's good for getting a quite different perspective on this flying thing, and probably useful for anybody thinking of becoming a controller. Somewhat ranty at times.

AOPA (US): Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. The site contains many articles of interest on a range of topics.

The Rules: This page at CASA's website has links to all of the air regulations...many individual files. To get everything there takes a while, is definitely not thrilling reading, but is totally free and will serve as a useful reference if you don't want to fork out for a hard copy!

Flight Safety Australia: A regular publication of CASA - the magazine is good light reading, and quite entertaining for people of any persuasion. The summary of international and domestic incidents is a highlight - how many hijackings do you think take place in the space of two months? Find out!

X-plane: X-plane by many accounts is a very good flight simulator. The free download is a time-limited demo (it only listens to your joystick inputs for 10 minutes each time)...the full version is less than A$40 and comes with 6 DVDs of scenery covering most of the planet. If you are enterprising you can probably get it for free. Also comes with aircraft and scenery creation tools that don't take much effort to learn how to use. I have found X-plane very useful in understanding many flight concepts: it's kind of neat to read about something then go and try it out in the simulator, and have it actually work. Aside from this, it's just plain fun to fly around in the simulated world.

Australian scenery packages for X-plane: The default Australian scenery with X-plane is rather bland - these packages contain scenery for the hundreds of aerodromes and airstrips and their surrounds. For instance, the default scenery for Adelaide overlays the right general class of textures over the right areas (urban, desert, etc); these scenery packages added all the buildings at all of Adelaide's airports, 3-d objects for buildings in the CBD and a few other landmarks...makes the simulation FAR more enjoyable.

GMaps: a utility that creates photorealistic ground textures for x-plane, deriving them from Google Maps. Large areas at high resolution take a long time, but the improvement in the simulator experience is well worth it.