I attended Hollister's 1-day Ground School today, along with two other students: Jeffrey and Patrick. Our instructor was Russell Holtz, also know as "the guy who wrote HGC's glider flight training book."
Because their normal classroom building recently caught fire and burned (looks really bad now), we met upstairs of one of the nice hangars down the road.
We (Jeffrey and I) arrived on-time and met Patrick shortly after. We waited around for about 10 minutes for some other students to arrive. They never did.
We began with an in-depth preflight of an SGS 2-32. After shifting gliders several times (pilots kept wanting to fly the ones we were preflighting), we managed to finish. Then we headed over to our "classroom" to begin going over the other material.
We covered:
- Flight Instruments
- Preflight
- Sailplane Aerodynamics
- Glider Performance
- Basic Flight Maneuvers
- Takeoff/Aero Tow
- Pattern/Landing
- Radio Use
We took a lunch break at 1:30ish after finishing up #3. The lunch was decent (we at the local joint right at the airport). After lunch we continued down the list and finished around 5pm.
Russell is a great instructor. He's been flying for a while, used to be an aerospace engineer, and really digs this stuff. He had good answers for all our questions and had no problem going way more in-depth on some topics.
I feel more confident about my flying "book knowledge" having been in the class. Little of the material was anything I hadn't heard before, but it was good to review it all in a short period of time.
The only disappointment was driving all the way to Hollister and never getting in the cockpit. Oh, well. Next time I'll fly.
Posted by jzawodn at December 08, 2002 09:49 PM
