Lecture 1: Introduction to Private Pilot Ground School
PROFESSOR 1: About yourselves,
so raise your hand, I guess, if you're from Wellesley. Nobody at Wellesley
wants to fly. OK. Harvard? OK. Everybody else can boo. Who has no MIT affiliation? All right. Awesome. Well, welcome. Raise your hand if
you've never been in a light aircraft, if
you have no experience in a little airplane. OK. PROFESSOR 2: That's good. That's a good number. For the MIT folks, how
many of you are undergrads? OK. That's a good number. How many of you are
graduate students? It's an even larger number, and
how many of you are neither? You're just like an
MIT alumni or staff. Just a few, OK, great. Well, welcome, all of you. PROFESSOR 1: And let's
just go through the goals. Let's see who's in the room. Who wants to eventually
fly an airplane? Whoa. How about a helicopter? Good. I'm happy to see that. What about drones? PROFESSOR 2: All right. That's a larger
number than last year. That's great. PROFESSOR 1: All right. So your course objectives are to
get ready for your official FAA Knowledge Test. This is sometimes called
the written test as opposed to the practical
test or the check ride that you do at the end
of your flight training.
It's available in a bunch
of different versions, including for airplanes
and helicopters. We're going to concentrate in
this class on airplane, partly because of the show of hands. You will also be prepared though
for the FAA's remote pilot test, if you decide to go
direct entry into the world of commercial drones. We hope that this is
also going to help you. Any kind of thorough
study usually helps you make more efficient
use of your in-aircraft time. And cause we have Tina here,
with her PhD in aero-astro, you're going to learn something
about the engineering as well. So what is great about aviation? People were dreaming about
flying a long time ago going back to the ancient Greeks. Only recently, we've been able
to do it which is a good thing.
One thing I like
about it is to look at the geology and
the organization of human settlement
on the planet. It's a lot of interesting
structural patterns that one can see from above. Flying, a lot of the greatest
engineering achievements of the last 100 years or so
are embodied in the aircraft that you can personally go
down to the local airport, rent, and fly.
Also, everybody at MIT is pretty
good at doing stuff at a desk and thinking about hard
problems when sitting at a desk, but there's no emotions to
manage other than depression. So flying combines everything. You might be a
little bit afraid. It's not natural to
be up in the air. So you're working all of your
human capacities at one time. You're managing your fear,
you're working your brain to think about
what's coming next, and you're also
working your muscles. Finally, you can get
to the beach quickly, but as I note here, most
places, unfortunately little airplanes when you
factor in the weather and all the training that you have
to do, a lot of times, you could've gotten
door-to-door faster.
PROFESSOR 2: I
might also just ask a couple of you guys,
pretty much everyone raised their hand
about wanting to fly, so maybe we can just
hear from a couple of you why do you want to fly? What's your interest
in taking the course? Yes. AUDIENCE: I'm also a PhD
student in aero-astro, so like you learn all the theory
for now, like, 5 years already, and I think it's a normal step
to like want to do it yourself. PROFESSOR 2: That's great
so just for the folks that couldn't hear– and what's your name? Lawrence. Lawrence was saying, he's
a PhD student in aerospace engineering and has
learned all the theory, and so it's a natural step to
want too go and do it yourself. That's great. PROFESSOR 1: All right. Can you do it? Yes, as in fact appears
on the slide here, there are a whole bunch of
little airports near us, and we'll show them
on a subsequent slide.
They all have flight
schools, and you can rent either airplanes
or helicopters or both, as well as find an
instructor to teach you. You can actually learned
to fly in about 10 hours. To me, it's a little
bit unfortunate that so much emphasis is
placed on getting a pilot's certificate, because it is
an independent achievement to actually be able to take
off, cruise around, and land without the instructor
having to touch anything.
So that achievement,
unfortunately, isn't recognized with
a little certificate, but that's actually
learning to fly. The rest of the training,
which takes three times as long as actually learning
to fly, is directed at flying a broken aircraft
or a lost aircraft, all this stuff that
prepares you to be the only pilot in the aircraft,
which may not even be a goal. For passengers,
they would rather have two pilots in the
front not just one pilot, but there's a bizarre focus
on training one person to do everything, which we'll
get into a little bit more. OK. So here's our local area, and
watch this fancy device here. Whoa. So we're somewhere
between Logan Airport on the bottom right
and Hanscom Field which is surrounded
by dashed blue line, telling you it's
a towered airport.
So those are the two
closest airports, I think. Norwood is just about as close. I'll show that right here on
the lower left of the figure. These airports that are
in a magenta color, those don't have control towers. Over here is Beverly,
and here's Lawrence. I think we've covered the
airports that MIT folks most normally fly out of, but there's
also Nashua not too far away. So you're surrounded
by airports, even if Logan is the one that
you're most familiar with. Hanscom Field is the most
substantial of the airports. This is only about a
third of the ramp space and hangars and structures
built up around Hanscom. That's a picture that I
took from a Robinson R44 helicopter, which you guys
could be flying in next week. And Tina's going to
tell you what she likes to do on a typical trip. PROFESSOR 2: So we heard
from a couple of you that are observers or
participants in the MIT flying club. Did anyone participate
in the fly-out a couple of years ago
to Maine, to Bar Harbor? All right. So this is a picture from
that flight to Bar Harbor.
Just grab the clicker for me. Thanks. So if you were to
drive, we took off just, as Phillip was describing,
one of the nearby airports is at Hanscom. So we took off from Hanscom. If you were to drive, it would
be a 4 1/2 hour drive to get there and back. So it wouldn't
really be something that you could easily
do as a day trip, but since we were flying,
it was a great day trip. So we flew up along the coast
all the way to Bar Harbor, and what was really
great about that is that we could go hiking.
So all these folks flew
in little airplanes from the Boston area
through the MIT flying club, and we all flew up to
the Bar Harbor, Maine. And then we went hiking in
the Acadia woods and forests, and it was really
beautiful, wonderful day, and then we flew back and landed
just after sunset back here. So it was a really beautiful
experience and a lot of fun to fly along the coastline. So I highly recommend it. If you're looking
for a longer trip. PROFESSOR 1: So I designed this. You can check it
out on my web blog. It is a trip in a
little Cirrus that'll take you to all 48
states in just 18 days and only about 50
hours of flight time, and that's a pretty
standard little airplane. But more importantly,
so people who– I just came back from
Bentonville, Arkansas, and there's a guy there
who's the grandson of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart.
So he can pretty much
do anything he wants, and what does he like to do? He has a couple P51 Mustangs. He was flying alongside
this little game Verde aerobatic plane
that we were testing out. He's got a super Corsair. There were only 10 built. He
started as a little flight school at the local airport. He flies his little
Phemon 300 business jet all over the world.
So I think that's a
proof that flying is fun, because people who
could do anything that they want to do also fly. You're going to
meet people from all around the world of
all different ages. It's a very diverse group,
especially if you like older guys, [LAUGHTER] which I do. Is it safe? OK. So we're going to show
you how to make it safe. It's not safe statistically,
compared to JetBlue, but that's not because
little airplanes or feeble. As you'll see in this class, I
think it's because of the way that people have
been flying them.
So we're going to show you how,
if you train like the airlines and fly like the airlines, you
can get much closer to airline level of safety in
little airplanes, as long as you're a little bit
conservative with the weather. And if all else fails, if
you're flying a modern design airplane, reach up and
pull the parachute. And the whole airplane
will float down, and you'll get out into a swamp. All right. I'm taking mine back. I thought that she was
on air, but she's not. OK. So this is me. I was class of 82 at MIT. It was much more challenging
then than it is for you guys. That's because the Wisconsin ice
sheet was covering the campus to a depth of about 100 feet. So we had to tunnel our
way from East Campus into the main buildings.
I've been flying since 2002. I'm an instructor at East Coast
Aero Club at Hanscom Field. I was also a regional jet pilot. I decided to learn to fly
jets, and there's no better way to do that than at the airlines. So I flew a 50-seat regional
jet called the CRJ, Canadair Regional Jet, for Delta. I have type ratings, which
we'll get into later. You need specific licensing for
each turbo jet powered aircraft that you fly. So I've got two of those. One of them is for the
smallest Cessna business jet. I usually fly though, these
days, a four-seat Cirrus, a Robinson R44, a
four-seat helicopter, and a Pilatus PC-12 which holds
either 11 people total or 60 sea turtles, which we'll
get into a little bit later. PROFESSOR 2: So this is
a little bit about me. In the top left
corner, you'll see me. I'm actually sitting in a
Cessna 172, here at Hanscom, and I'm doing my engine run-up. And what do you
see out the window? Does anyone recognize it? AUDIENCE: An F-18. PROFESSOR 2: An F-18,
so what's really cool is that this airport
that I fly out of, Hanscom, is also a
military Air Force Base.
Which is really exciting,
because upon occasion, you'll actually see
military jets come out. And they, of course,
did not wait for me, even though I was first in line. They nicely cut in front. They called themselves jet 1
and jet 2, and they went out. And it really looked
like they didn't take any space at all, any of
the runway length to take off. It really looked, from where I
was sitting, right next to it, like they just turned like
a rocket ship and took off, and it was really amazing. PROFESSOR 1: Sorry, Tina. PROFESSOR 2: No problem. So this is just a
picture of me just going on a flight with some
other MIT folks in the area, and then, of course, if all else
fails, you can just jump out. So a little bit of background. So I'm also aero-astro,
just like you, Lawrence, and so I studied Course 16 here. I did my undergrad in 2009,
and I was really passionate about it and continued on. And I did the MIT System
Design and Management Program for my master's
degree and then continued on in an interdepartmental PhD
across Aero-Astro Engineering Systems and Sloan.
It was a really
great experience. One of the things that got
me really excited about it is that, when I was an undergrad
in the Course 16 department, we were developing
a satellite, and we needed to test that satellite. So we actually got to go
on a zero gravity flight. So I don't know, has anyone
heard of a zero gravity flight or the Vomit Comet? All right. So a couple of folks
didn't raise their hands. So the idea is that
the plane flies in a parabolic trajectory. And much like a
roller coaster, when you're at the top
of the parabola, or the top of the
roller coaster, you know how your stomach
feels like it's lifting? All right, we're
getting some head nods.
The rest of you guys really
need to go on a roller coaster. So when you get that,
you can actually, when an airplane
flies like that, you can have everyone
inside the airplane float up and have that sensation of
zero gravity, or microgravity. It lasts about 30
seconds, and that's also how they filmed certain
movies, like Apollo 13, to show the astronauts
in weightlessness. So we use that to
test our satellite. So it was a really
great experience. It got me really
excited about things, and then I felt
very similar to you, that I wanted to see
the theory in action, and so I became a pilot. In terms of my
professional career, I developed electronic
warfare systems. I went on to Raytheon. I was the chief engineer
of a $40 million advanced radar and
electronic warfare system. Now, I'm into entrepreneurship
and have my own company in the security space. And I've been a
pilot since 2012, and I love flying with
the MIT Flying Club. And I'm currently
working on my IFR.
Who knows what an
IFR stands for? Shout it out. [INTERPOSING VOICES] PROFESSOR 2: Good job. Instrument flight ratings. If you don't know, that's fine. We're going to cover that. So we'll explain it
all, but right now, I fly a, pretty much usually, the
training aircraft, the Cessna 172. It's a very, very safe
and stable aircraft. So we'll talk about a bunch
of different aircraft.
PROFESSOR 1: All right. So let's hope that you've
done the pre-reading. If you hadn't, I know everybody
here in this room, at least the MIT and Harvard folks,
are good at the book stuff. So please do hit the books. Some of the thornier and
less interesting topics we're going to rely on you
to read through the book. So don't worry if you get
everything in the class. We're giving you the highlights
that are in the books, and passing is 70 on the test. All right. Optional supplies, just
for your reference, if you study a typical
flight student, a lot of them will have a non-FAA textbook. It's not necessary,
but some people like the different perspective.
There's a free online
one that we reference later that is written
by a PhD physicist which is kind of interesting. A lot of people
have in hard copy a big, thick book called
FAR/AIM with the regulations and the FAA's overall guidance
on how to use airports and electronic navigation. There are test preparation
books that you can get and electronic
versions of this that just give you sample tests. You're going to use one of the
websites from the King Schools.
It's a popular vendor for those. And then before your
check ride, you'll be reading the Airman
Certification Standards. FAA still use this
sexist language. There's airman and
airmen for all pilots, and this is tells you what you
need to demonstrate when you're getting your final check. Most people will also buy
their own personal headset. The noise-canceling ones
make life a lot better. Lightspeed is probably a
little more rugged than Bose. Bose is more
comfortable on the ears. The front desk of a
typical flight school will have all of
this stuff for sale. The process, a lot of
people wonder, well, how do I get my private
pilot's license. You need the flight training. You apply for student pilot
certificate on an FAA website. I don't know if that's
still running completely. I just renewed the
registration for an aircraft, so that part of
the FAA is running. I don't know if they're sending
out Student Pilot Certificates during the shutdown or not. You have to do one
medical exam in your life at least with an aviation doctor
who's been blessed by the FAA, and you get your
third class medical.
After, eventually,
you'll be able just to go to your regular
doctor, if you want. Then, you take this
knowledge test, and that's what you're being
prepped for in this class. And finally, you'll
do your practical exam with an FAA-designated
examiner, one of whom should actually
be here tomorrow. So you can ask him
how he tortures people on the check ride. Actually, I had
to take one– you have to do a lot of these steps
over again, when you do a type rating for a new aircraft. So when I worked at
the airline, the oral, there is a guy who
is famously harsh. And he would keep
people who were trying to fly the Canadair Regional
Jet in knots for hours and have them sweating
during the oral exam. And the first
question he asked me, the airplane has
these hydraulic pumps. They're AC motors, and it has
the engines generating the AC power. But a lot of stuff runs
on DC, and I'd really wondered about the electrical
systems of the airplane.
So I called up a friend of mine. It's a physics professor
at UC Berkeley, and we had a one-hour discussion
about when it made sense to generate AC and
pipe that around the airplane and high voltage
versus low voltage and DC. And so I hung up and said
goodbye to my friend, Joel. And then a few weeks later,
there was the oral exam, and the first
question the guy asked me was– and I'd
put on my resume that I just had a
bachelor's degree. I didn't list any
of my other degrees. I have a PhD in AAS, it happens. So this guy who is the bane of
all the pilots at this Delta subsidiary, he said, Philip,
why does the airplane have both an AC and a DC system? So I gave him a
little five minute spiel based on my conversation
with my physics professor friend. He said, OK the oral is over.
It's time to go
into the simulator. Didn't ask me a
single other question. All right. So let's do the part that
we should have done earlier. Now, at least, I know
how to put on the mic. So it's conventional
in religious settings to bring in a reformed
sinner, and that's what we have here,
somebody who's found faith and is now living with faith. GUEST SPEAKER: Thank you
so much, Phillip and Tina, for having me here. I'm Minakshe. I'm a fourth year PhD
student at Harvard. I do neuroscience,
and when I'm not trying to understand
how the brain works, I like to do most
things adventurous.
And I had really awesome
friends who introduced me to the MIT Flying Club, so that
was my first general aviation experience. I was a passenger on a fly-out
to the Republic Airport. It's in Long Island. It's really nice, because
most of the times, if we get cleared, you get to
fly over the Hudson, and you get this really nice
view of the New York skyline. So the other photo is actually
Phillip and his sitter. So we're super lucky to
be on another fly-out out as a passenger, and I
got to fly in his Cirrus. So this is to Chatham, another
really beautiful airport in the Cape Cod. So all of that inspired
me to become a pilot, but what really enabled me
was precisely this course. So I am doing my
PhD in neuroscience. My aviation knowledge
was literally like [INAUDIBLE] it
was like, OK, there are all these little buttons
and dials, probably just have to check all those things
and just like magic the planes are flying.
So this course was what
really laid the foundation for the aviation experience
in the rest of my life. And Tina was one
of our instructors, when I took the course. It was a slightly
different format. It was over the entire
semester, once a week, but I really enjoyed it. So at the end of
it, I felt really ready to take the
practical flying lesson. So I was a student pilot at
East Coast Aero Club, Bedford. So my two years of grad
school stipend that I saved was like put to really good
use and the picture on the left is my first solo.
So that's me doing the
traffic pattern at Bedford. So I didn't have any like fancy
electronic flight back then. It was just all paper maps. So that was just
the GPS on my phone tracking me doing the traffic
pattern Bedford, and like you can see how happy I
was with all my solos, the smileys on my logbook.
So then, think end of September,
got my private pilot's license. So I flew the Warrior, so yeah. So that's me right after passing
the check ride in the Warrior. So after PPL, I wanted
to take spin training and did a little bit of
aerobatics in the decathlon at East Coast. So decathlon is a tail-wheel
aerobatic aircraft, and when you do
your PPL, they're always going to tell you
like you will do stalls, and they're always going
to tell you like OK, and we don't want to spin. I was like, OK, I want
it feel heart is going. Yeah? PROFESSOR 2: Maybe share
what PPL stands for. GUEST SPEAKER: Oh, sorry. Yeah. PPL is Private Pilot's License
which is what all of us are here for. So yeah, so after a little
bit of aerobatics and spin training, so my recent
flying experience is being a lot with the MIT
flying club now as a pilot. So I did the same– the first time I was ever
on the light aircraft was this fly-out with
the MIT Flying Club to Republic Airport.
And very recently, I
did that as a pilot, getting passengers
with the Flying Club. So that felt really nice. So you can see, like
I'm over the Hudson, 2,00 feels southbound,
towards the Republic, and you get this really awesome
view of the New York skyline, and yeah. It's really beautiful. You get to talk to like
Laguardia, New York, and I spoke to Kennedy tower. That was like literally
a dream come true for me. So I would relive this moment
like any number of times. I'm 500 feet above the ground
level, and like you can see, the tiny shadow of my aircraft
and like talking to JFK. And in 500 feet, because there
are all these commercial jets descending to land
at JFK, so it's a totally beautiful feeling. So I've also been
flying with my friends, and like this is the
Winnipesaukee lake near Laconia, New Hampshire, and
yeah, for the Harvard folks– I think it's just one person– you can probably recognize
like Sanders Theatre. So this is a city tour.
So you get cleared into the
Boston class Broadway airspace. Yeah. This is one of my
friends who took a photo of like the Harvard campus. You can see Sanders
Theatre at Memorial Church and just the fog setting in. So my mom visited me from India. I took her flying. So that was a very
beautiful feeling like to show her what
this means to me. Although, she was totally
terrified the whole time. Yeah. So I guess,
obviously, I love it. It's really fun the
beautiful view is experience and like the super
adrenaline excitement every time I have the plane. And it is challenging,
and it's really something like new
rewarding to learn from every single experience,
every single flight and, of course, the people. So yeah. Thank you, and just
sharing my experience from like having no aero-astro
background to being here, I hope it inspires some of you. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] PROFESSOR 2: Thank
you so much, Minakshe, for coming back and
sharing your experience.
So that could be
you guys next year. So a little bit about
the FAA written exam. So as we said, sometimes
it's called the written. That is the
knowledge-based exam. So that is what, ideally,
you'll be prepared to pass with flying colors. So it's a computer-based
multiple choice exam. They usually give you
about 2 1/2 hours, and you don't necessarily
need the whole time. There are 60 questions,
and they basically shuffle those questions. So we're going to be
teaching content somewhat that goes beyond this exam,
because this is an MIT course.
So we're actually in
teach a little bit more about the aerodynamics and
how really planes fly and go a little bit beyond
just the course, but we will cover
all of this material. And then, so as Phillip already
said, to pass you need as a 70, but we believe that you
can score higher than that. So we really encourage you
to take this exam right after the course.
Phillip can actually
endorse your log book, or you can actually
print out a log book and endorse you to
take that written exam. So just following the course,
the final exam of this course, will be a practice a exam,
and so you can take that. You can actually
take it as many times as you want in order to
pass, but hopefully, you don't have to take
it too many times. And after that,
we'll endorse you so that you can actually go
take the actual FAA written exam and get that out of the way. So you can be on your
way to becoming a pilot. PROFESSOR 1: OK. So most East Coast Aero Club– I'm an instructor there–
most of the people that I've seen will skim
through at least the FAA books about three times
before they take the test.
They will use a test prep
book, and they end up getting a 98 or 100 on the exam. So they do a little bit– they go a little bit overboard
if the goal is just to pass. Again, if you have
the physics question, a physics-type question,
we do recommend this free online textbook
from this physics PhD. These presentations,
of course, are all available from the
course homepage. You can download them
and follow all the links. As Tina mentioned,
I can endorse you. Any aero-astro majors who
complain that it's too hard, remember that everything that
you're reading from the FAA is designed for somebody
who's still in high school.
Tina. PROFESSOR 2: So this is
just a sample question. They give you a flavor. Obviously, we haven't
touched the material yet, but why don't we just take a
minute to read this, and then see if you guys can have a good
guesstimate as to the answer? So I thought this
would be appropriate, given the weather conditions. You guys had to trudge through
a lot of snow and slush to get here today. So here's a question
about frost. Why is frost considered
hazardous to flight? OK. Who thinks it's A? Who thinks it's B? All right. Who thinks it's C. All right, good job, guys. Just generally, icing,
bad for a plane. So anything that's really
increasing lift or increasing control effectiveness,
that's not what you're getting
when you have frost.
It's a bad thing. So we'll discuss
this in more detail. PROFESSOR 1: All right. Here's the schedule for
the next couple days. We'll just talk about
the parts that are fun. This afternoon, we're going to
be visited by an F-22 pilot. That's a little better
than a Cessna, Piper, or Cirrus in terms
of performance, if not in terms of
cost-effectiveness. Lunchtime, there's
going to be pizza and a slideshow about
Oshkosh, the big aviation gathering that happens
in Wisconsin every year. Tomorrow, you're going to
hear from a designated pilot examiner, Marc
Nathanson, who's also an acrobatics instructor and a
US Air Force F4 fighter pilot veteran. Day three, Michael Holdsworth
who's going to come in. He's a local drone
pilot for Hollywood. So he'll tell you about using
the commercial drone license to do something interesting.
At lunch on day three,
on Thursday, you're going to hear from a veteran. Actually, no, he's an
active duty officer in the Brazilian Air
Force who's here at MIT, and he's going to tell you
about being a test pilot. And then at the
end of the class, we've tacked on the
founder of ForeFlight which is one of the most
successful aviation app companies. They're in a lot
of airline cockpits now as a replacement
for paper, and they do a lot of flight planning. And so he's going
to bring himself to talk about any questions
you might have about starting a company and being
successful in business and also one of his
engineering folks, I think, to talk about the
engineering behind the app.
That's going to be a
little bit more informal. It's optional, but we
think it'll be interesting. OK. So welcome again,
and now you're part of the community of
aviators, at least as soon as you go on your first
MIT Flying Club fly-out. It is better to be
on the ground wishing you were in the air
than vice versa, but people have
been wishing to be in the air for tens
of thousands of years.
And we think that– well, we feel lucky
to be some of the few who are able to control our
own destiny through the air. So now, it's time for questions. While you're formulating
your brilliant questions, enjoy these photos which I
snapped at the Reno air races, where the Blue Angels
obviously already visited. AUDIENCE: What's the
[INAUDIBLE] on the airplane? [LAUGHTER] PROFESSOR 1: So what why do
you have both AC power and DC power on a big jet? Big jets, the
flight controls are too heavy to be
operated by a human, so you need hydraulic power.
Basically, there may still
be steel cables going out to the flight controls,
but they're just modulating hydraulic pressure. How do you generate
hydraulic pressure? There's a big motor to
pump the hydraulics, and it's easier to run a
big motor with AC power compared to DC power, and the
engines are also spinning. So if you just think
about Maxwell's equations, it's simpler to run AC for
that, and also, of course, you can have higher voltage
and transform it down. And then for the electronics,
DC power is what they want. So that's why the DC's in there,
to run radios and so forth..
