Groundschool Class 11
14 January

    Before class this evening, one of the other guys said he had 36 hours' flying time in and was going to solo next week, and no one but me seemed surprised.  So I take it that I'm probably more or less on track.  I now have some 26 hours myself and Adam has been saying that I'm going to have to solo soon.  Sure is different from the way they used to teach flying!

    The rest of the class was mostly just a reading of the textbook--which I'd already read in preparing for class--so I didn't manage to learn very much.

    There was one interesting demonstration, however.  The subject was dangers in perceptions and visual illusions.  Chris Edwards had a whiteboard on which he had written two columns of words--the names of certain colors.  In the left column, the words and the marker-colors coincided.  In the other column, the marker-colors were differetn from the names.  First he covered the right column and got the guy sitting next to me to read the words.  Then he covered the left column and had the guy TRY to name the colors.  He had a terrible time because he couldn't keep from reading the words, instead of naming the marker-colors.  Here's how it looked:
 
 

Brown 
Green 
Blue 
Orange 
Blue 
Brown 
Orange 
Green
Say what color each word is. 
                                              
 
Brown 
Green 
Blue 
Orange 
Blue 
Brown 
Orange 
Green
 

    It turned out that the trick was to look at the final letter of each word; then it because a little easier.
 

Back to "Learning Flying"
My home page.