Ground School

The flying club offers ground school. 17 classes over a span of 10 weeks. Classes are typically on Mondays and Thursdays and run from 7 - 10pm. If we factor 30 minutes before and after each class - that's a total of 8 hours a week. This of course does not include all of the studying and reading one would do between classes to be prepared.

The purpose of the ground school is to cover all of the materials required to pass the Transport Canada written PPL examination. TC also requires a minimum of 40 hours of ground training for the private license.

I am simply unable to make the time commitment, specifically because I can't run away from a busy household with two little kids, leaving my wife to fend for herself (I already work long hours). So I made the decision to do the ground training of my license in a self study mode. I know that when I'm interested in a topic I have no problem focusing and putting time aside to learn what is required.

Looking around on the Internet I found that an outfit based in Manitoba offers an online ground school. The course is acceptable by TC standards for the 40 hours required. I tried to do a lot of Internet research for some reviews but to be honest came up with no other online offerings, and no reviews of the online course or its content. I decided to just take a stab at it - if it was really bad I could always try and get my money back.

I will admit right now that I am very pleased with the content so far. The course is completely geared towards someone like me who is training for their PPL. Each section has a powerpoint presentation of between 15-80 slides, a 60 minute training video which is essentially an instructor doing the powerpoint presentation to a group in a classroom, a forum for discussion on the topic (sparsely used), links to other documentation, and a quiz to ensure you have completed the learning and understand the topics.

Aside from this they also gave me the following "free" courses:

PSTAR: Pre Solo Air Regulations
Private Air Exercises
Pilot Decision Making
Garmin GNS 430

These have all been somewhat useful already. The PSTAR is an exam which I hope to soon challenge which is required by TC to obtain a "student permit" which allows you to fly Solo under the supervision of an instructor. At the end of this course I found some great review material for my Radio Operator's certificate examination as well.

Private Air Exercises goes hand in hand with the Tranport Canada training syllabus. Each Air Exercise contains a powerpoint presentation, a ground briefing video, a forum, and an air video. The air videos are amazing. They managed to synchronize the air exercise so that you may watch it from a number of different viewpoints: Cockpit, Rear mounted camera, side mounted camera, and from a secondary aircraft filming the entire thing. This has been very useful for me - you can even watch them all at the same time!

So far - money well spent. I guess with the ground school that I'm now in full momentum towards the PPL.

For those of you interested - the material was offered by Harv's Air Pilot Training based in Steinbach/Winnipeg Manitoba - and their ground school website is available at PilotTraining.ca.