Big bite of elephant.

For some time now, I have been planning and learning (slowly) and trying different approaches to get better with this flying this but one doubt always remained - what if I can't stomach it? I can learn it, it's just technical stuff, the mechanical stuff also I can master with practice but let's face it, I am scared in roller-coasters and the reason I decided to be a pilot (one of the reasons) was to face the fear of flying. What if it's too much for me to handle?

So I decided to spend some moolah on a real flying lesson. And guess what it's all going to be alright! It was a small Cessna 172 SP (I mean it was a small plane called a Cessna not that this one was small for its breed), but it is a small plane hardly any elbow room with two people in it. My instructor flew it most of the time, but I did get a feel of the control for a little while. It's not bad. It's quite a nice, thrilling feeling to be up there looking down at the world like a map or (let's face it) an aerial photograph. :)

I enjoyed it enough that I would want to go back up again if I could afford it.

I took a couple of bad photographs and two small, useless videos while I was up there 2000 feet above the ground. But hey, these are not from youtube, they are mine, a record of my very own adventure in the air, so I like'em!

This one is what I saw outside the plane:

I love technology!

What is technology, just a number of digits, electromagnetic pulses, graphics, programming, embedded, mobile...blah, blah and more blah! It's all crap, meaningless drivel until.....yes, until it comes to play a part in your life. Until you can watch a movie 1000 times clearer and watch it again without rewinding it you don't care what a DVD is. Until you can play a game that looks like it's going to come alive right out of the screen, you don't give a hoot what a graphics card is. Until you can talk to your kids studying on the other side of the globe in real time, you don't care a damn how telecommunications is changing the world.

So, to make a long story short, science and technology for its own sake is what people like Einstein can get excited about (and may be a few million geeks) but the ordinary person, the so-called layman (I don't what he lays but that's what he's called) only gets excited about it when he can see the change that it makes in his own life. That application of technology never ceases to amaze me no matter how many times I come across the examples.

One time I was cooking something and I went to grab the handle of the frying pan while it was on the stove and I found that the handle was much less hot than it should be. Made of special metal, no doubt. That made me utter one of those "wow, this is so cool" things.

Recently I came across a similar item. It's called Virtual Reality glasses. Strictly something for the gamers of this world. I can do better than describing them by showing you the video demo of this amazing product. Take a look.

Landing 3 - Still alive

If you still didn't get bored looking at those landings, here's another one. I think it's a little better but that's just my opinion. :)

Surviving a landing

Well, this is not much better but the plane lands on the runway and nobody dies in the landing so I am okay with. Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, as we airmen say. :)

Gearbuster Landing

You want to know what I am up to these days? In my attempt to eat an elephant I have been practicing flying on FSX. Look at this video to see how good I am. This is all my work, I did the landing, I made the video, I uploaded it to YouTube. I am quite fond of watching videos on YouTube but this is the first time I have uploaded one. It sucks but it's mine. :D

Another aviation joke

Look at this landing

South African A340-600 Landing in Vienna from Luke Harvest on Vimeo.

Eating an elephant!

Question: How do you eat an elephant?

Answer: One spoon at a time!

No, no, that's not my way of saying that I have turned non-vegetarian. I am still quite strictly vegetarian other than having an occasional omelette, but I found this English expression quite funny and very apt for what I am about to tell you.

I suddenly got it into my head that I want to be a pilot!

When I took my first, very first, plane journey to US from India, I was quite excited! I loved the feeling of taking off, being airborne and even landing. It was a good landing. But since then I have lost count of my plane journies (nothing phenomenal there, most people do after 6), and during all these air voyages I have had some unpleasant experiences. No, nothing too bad, nothing extraordinary that would get in the newspapers, just simple stuff like weather turbulence where the plane drops for 10-20 seconds at a time straight down and you start looking for something to plug into your mouth (like a shoe) just so you can keep the heart down ; or the landing where the pilot brakes hard immediately after the rear wheels touch down like he's riding a bicycle. Stuff like that has made me kind of...well, not afraid of flying but kind of apprehensive, even during takeoffs and landings, normal ones.
So acting on the age-old wisdom of "face your fears" I thought I'd go for some flying training. Which is kind of weird coming from me as I don't even like roller coasters. That heart-in-your-throat feeling is not very good! Other than that though, flying training in England, (I am sure, everywhere), is quite expensive. I can't afford it! It'd be a huge project for me to take up. The best idea for a huge project, if possible, is to take it in small steps - so I am starting my training from the computer. There are several programs available that simulate the flying experience, some of them free like FlightGear, most of them paid like Microsoft Flight Simulator, arguably the most popular of them all. It's marketed as a game but it is in fact so accurate in its simulation that people do, all over the world, use it as a training aid, before, during or after their real flying training.
Then there are books available for real as well as simulated training which help you understand the concepts and acquire the related knowlege. And believe me there's an enormous amount of knowledge to acquire, it's not just holding the stick (the control column) and moving it back and forth!
During my research on the topic (you are right, it started from www.google.co.uk) , I found this community or rather communities of people who fly a plane on the computer and then online, using software programs to interface with other pilots and even real, live ATCs! I was amazed! Look at www.vatsim.net if you are interested! So, that's the next step of my training ladder. Then there are other things to do, until, step by step I build up my skills on the ground and hopefully also my fund for my real training.

That's why I call it by the funny title, breaking a huge task into very small, minute, doable parts and then tackling them one by one. That's how you eat an elephant....one spoon at a time!

Edit: Thought I'd put a picture there to spice things up. It's a beautiful picture and courtesy of fellow VATSIM pilot Jordan Jafferjee.