Online Training

I'm sure many of you are having "cabin fever" and are itching to get out of the house and go fly. As luck would have it I have done a little bit of searching around the internet and found some educational websites to help keep your flying mind sharp even when you are weathered out.

As many of you who frequently surf the internet know there are literally thousands of aviation websites at your fingertips. The question you have to ask yourself is what do you want to know about? Initially I recommend looking around www.aopa.org as well as www.eaa.org. These two websites alone have thousands of articles, movies, as well as multitudes of interactive media that is very user friendly to work with. At AOPA’s website you can even earn FAA Wings credit for some of their online courses.

For those of you who have already mastered those websites I would encourage you to take some time and look at the new FAASTeam website at www.faasafety.gov. At this website you can become a registered user, log in, and have many interactive courses available to you to refresh or maybe even learn something new all in the comfort of your home! Everything from preparing you for a long cross country to multi engine refresher training the FAA safety site has some great tools for you to use.

Many of you may have become familiar with some of those common websites. I applaud you for staying ahead of the airplane on that. Now let’s really try and challenge your mind. In my travels on the internet, I have found a website that truly will start to exercise your mind and make you want to dig deeper for more answers. I encourage you all to go to http://www.luizmonteiro.com/Index.htm His website will show you what happens when your pitot static system acts up, how to figure your wind triangle, and of course let you learn how to use HSI’s and VOR’s (and more importantly the effects of wind!). I highly encourage everyone to spend some time at this website. This will truly get you back into the books about flying.

Recently I went to www.naco.faa.gov and clicked on “Free Downloads” to find a page that had all the information you could ever want to know about IFR, VFR, and terminal area charts. You name the symbol on the chart, this website will tell you what it means.

I hope that you all can see that these are just a few of the websites available to you. There are literally thousands upon thousands of aviation related websites out there for you to take advantage of. Everything from airplane building to why they call it “Zulu time” is out there. I encourage you all to take advantage of those cold and snowy days to brush up on some of those things long since forgotten from ground school.