Checkride or Bust

All about flying, training, pilot gear, and $100 hamburgers

Review: ForeFlight & Stratus 2S

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iPad ForeFlight & Stratus 2S

Simply put, the iPad will change how you fly.

If it hasn’t already, that is.

This review is for anyone who’s wondering if they should bother with bringing an iPad loaded with ForeFlight into the cockpit — or if adding a Stratus 2S ADS-B receiver to your flight bag is worth the cost.

It would be impossible to do a full-featured review on these two products. They’re incredibly feature-rich. Instead, I want to touch on the five things that make ForeFlight paired with Stratus a smart move for any pilot, especially those who are still using paper charts.

Let’s get right down to it.

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Becoming a Commercial Pilot in 30 Days

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A snippet from my commercial pilot temporary airman certificate...

A snippet from my commercial pilot temporary airman certificate…

Can you become a commercial pilot in less than 30 days? Turns out the answer is yes!

To be fair, we’re not really talking about going from zero experience to a commercial certificate in just a month. I started this journey as an instrument-rated private pilot. I also had a couple of the commercial requirements done — like the written test and the 2-hour day dual XC flight .

But August 2015 was no cakewalk.

After earning my instrument rating in the first half of 2014, I’d been slowly chipping away at time requirements needed to get to the 250 hour minimum needed for the commercial pilot’s certificate. (Like with my private and instrument training, I created a spreadsheet in Google Docs to keep track of my progress — and estimate my costs.)

At the same time, I’d been working on ground stuff, building a lesson plan binder for my CFI certificate.

During one lesson plan session, I mentioned to my instructor that I was thinking I’d be ready to really start working on the commercial flying in the next few months – my spreadsheet told me that finishing the final commercial prerequisites would bring me up to 250 hours. Then I heard the bad news. My CFI told me the school’s Socata Trinidad was getting a new engine at the beginning of September, so it was going to be down for quite a while between the replacement time and break-in. Shit.

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Flyboys Kneeboard Review

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How many AMUs did you spend on your last piece of flying gear?

Flying isn’t cheap. There’s a reason pilots joke that $1,000 equals one AMU (Aviation Monetary Unit).

But pilot gear doesn’t have to be expensive to change the way you fly. One of my favorite cockpit tools is something that I only paid a measly $35 for. (That’s only 0.035 AMUs!)

I’m talking about the Flyboys Kneeboard.

Image from FlyBoys.com

Image from FlyBoys.com

I really love this kneeboard — in fact, I’ve helped sell a lot of them. It seems like every friend I fly with has picked one up after seeing how easy it is to juggle checklists, approach plates, and clearances with this thing.

(Postscript: The FlyBoys kneeboard can also take an attachment for the company’s equally awesome PIVOT Case iPad mount.)

The thing that sets this kneeboard apart is the fact that you can use rings to clip important documents to the top of it. I use it for checklists. When I don’t need the checklist, I can just flip it over my leg and out of the way of my note pad. When I do need it, I can get access to any page without fumbling around.

Three pens clip on the side of your leg, and charts have a see-through strap to keep them in place. A clipboard holds everything else where you want it. And there’s room for small extras in a couple of pockets.

It’s a simple solution to cockpit organization.

So simple, in fact, that I don’t need to spend any more time writing about it…

King Schools Commercial Pilot Course Review

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King Schools Commercial Pilot Course

There are lots of Private Pilot and Instrument Rating ground school courses out there.

But the pickings are slimmer for people working on their commercial certificates. One of the only online ground school options comes from King Schools — and it’s what I ended up using to get ready for my commercial written and practical tests.

For starters, do you really need a formal ground school program to get ready for the commercial license?

Well, it’s true that the commercial is in a lot of ways just an extension of the private pilot certificate, but in a lot of ways it isn’t. At the same time, if you’re considering becoming a CFI after earning your commercial, it’s a good idea to start off with a solid foundation of knowledge, and a real ground school program does that.

So I bought King Schools’ Commercial Pilot Written Exam & Checkride course. It was my first course from them.

The course is pretty fairly priced — and here’s a protip: King Schools occasionally offer 20% off discounts to their mailing list. There’s a good reason to join.

King’s written test prep is made up of about 9 hours of video content. And I’ve got to say that I learned a lot more than I expected to learn — more than just memorizing written test answers. And the content was actually pretty enjoyable to work through. Kudos to John and Martha King (and their team) for that. The videos are broken into bite-sized subjects, and you take the applicable written questions after each segment.

One nice feature is that you can either access the material on a computer or on an iPad or iPhone. The King Schools iOS app lets you download the video segments for offline viewing, and it now lets you complete the test questions too, synching back up with your account when you go online.

Like most other online ground school courses, you take practice tests to unlock your written test endorsement.

The checkride course features Martha King taking a full commercial checkride (oral and flight test) with an actual designated pilot examiner, about 5 more hours of video in total. It’s a really nice resource to have for anyone with pre-checkride jitters.

Let’s be honest for a second here: the FAA written exams are bad tests. They’re full of tricks and technicalities, which isn’t what testing aeronautical knowledge should be about. That’s why many courses just try to get you to memorize the answers and get it over with. I really like the fact that the King Schools course actually teaches the material well. I walked into the testing room feeling confident that I could answer any trick or dubiously-worded question that got thrown at me.

And I ended up getting a 97% on the commercial written.

At the end of the day, I think the best testimonial I can give King Schools is the fact that I bought their CFI Get It All Kit shortly after passing the written test…

If there’s any instructor worth learning from, it’s John and Martha King.

PIVOT Case for iPad Review

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Pivot-Case

I’m a pretty big fan of anything that makes it easier to get information in front of me in the airplane. That’s a big reason why I’m such a big fan of the FlyBoys kneeboard.

So, when I saw one of my favorite YouTube pilots, Flight Chops, using a PIVOT Case, I was intrigued. And when I discovered that it was made by the same guys who made the FlyBoys kneeboard — and that it was compatible with my kneeboard — I wanted one.

For a while, I’ve been trying to figure out a new way to get organized in the cockpit.

While my iPad setup worked fine, it was bulky to lug around and it didn’t work quite right in other airplanes — like the interestingly-shaped yoke in the Socata Trinidad that I was doing my commercial and CFI work in. That’s a big part of what made the PIVOT Case look so interesting.

The PIVOT Case uses an innovative locking mechanism to click into place in the airplane, which makes it easy to switch the iPad between being a piece of avionics in the plane and an all-purpose tablet at home.

And after flying with it for about 40 hours now, I’m happy to report that it’s one of the best cockpit gear upgrades I’ve made…

But it didn’t go quite like I’d planned.

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