Dec 28, 2011

About that flying thing....

I realise that the premise of this blog was to be an account of my flying adventures and WoW shenanigans. I gave up the WoW (two whole months clean!) and have hit a bit of a snag with the flying.

The last entry I made after flying was my last proper commercial navigation flight. I have done one since and plan to do another soon but they are just going to be recency flights so I can keep my skill up.

Reason being is actually a little nugget of wisdom from a flight instructor. I cannot for the life of me remember what the exact wording is but it went along the lines of "Unless you can do it regularly, you are wasting your money at this point in your training."

Yes, it was crushing to hear. Unfortunately, I can understand why this is true. I spent so much time off from flying last year that my skills in commercial level navigation dropped significantly. When I started back flying this year, I did not account for the drop in skill so it came as a little bit of a rude shock when I jumped in the plane with an instructor and found that I just was not up to scratch. It knocked a rather large hole in my boat and it was filling up with water fast, so to speak.

It seems to be a common problem with those of us who do not come with a large trust account or rich parents. I met a guy at a friends party on Boxing Day and had a long (abliet drunk) discussion about the joys, trials and tribulations of flying. He has met a similar problem that I have. Commercial Nav exercises are bloody expensive to be able to do at the pace which is required. He did not get as far as I did, only being able to just get past his private ticket. Matt has been out of currency for the last 4 years which is really sad to see. He met the point of moving on with his life, to come back to his education at a later date when he is better set up to be able to meet the burden of paying for flying tuition.

Even TVSA (who do pilot training through FEE-HELP) want me to finish my commercial training before I move down there to study with them. It is giving me the shits at the moment!

So I have been concentrating on getting the rest of my life sorted out at the moment. The last three years have been more or less a suicide run at trying to force it through. Done through borrowed money and whatever is left after my bills have been paid. It has no doubt been an amazing and life changing journey and I would never change a damn thing for the world, neither is this the end of that journey. This is just a detour.

The flying will resume and with the GoPro camera, I will do more and more flying videos. One will be made every time I go for a flight, even if they are a little boring. I have a couple of 4wding videos to finish cutting together as well but trying to handle 10 hours of video and cut it down into a 5 min video is a little harder  than I thought. Not to mention this old computer is woefully inadequate for the task at hand!

My research to build a new one has finally come to a close. I know exactly what I want and I even have the slightly cheaper alternative also. In short I want to build a system around a GTX590 graphics card and an Intel i7 3930k CPU. That system is going to cost me around the 2.8k mark. If I change out the Motherboard, RAM and CPU to ones which suit an i7 2600k it brings it back to about the 2.2k mark. Both rather expensive options but needed for Diablo 3, video editing and triple screen Flight Simulator. I already have the screens for it too!
So that is most of the important stuff happening at the moment. I will leave you with the last flying video I made back in October.

No comments:

Post a Comment