What can I expect on my First Flight???

As with starting anything new, there will be a certain amount of anxiety going into your first couple of flights. We understand that here at Ace Flight School, so we have decided to include this section to help ease your mind and let you focus on how exciting your first few lessons will be!

• Prior to Flight
  • We will start by introducing you to your airplane. This will include walking around the plane and talking about various parts, why they're there, and how they work.
  • After our walk around we will take a look inside the airplane. You will notice what will seem like a lot of foreign instruments. We'll narrow all of the things you see down to our most important instruments, then we'll talk about why they're there and how they'll be helping you in your training.
  • Now that we know our airplane we'll step back from it for a few minutes and observe our airport environment. The details will be discusses later on in the training, but we will talk a little bit about some of the basic things we'll be dealing with.
• Starting the Engine, Taxi, and Run-Up
  • In order to get moving we obviously need to get the engine running, so we'll discuss the procedure for starting the engine.
  • Now that we have the ability to move, we need to get to the runway. There's no steering wheel in an airplane that steers the airplane around on the ground (such as in your car), so we'll need to introduce how to "drive" the airplane on the ground. This is referred to as taxiing.
  • One very important step prior to flight that is not used when driving a car is an engine run-up. Unlike in a car, if our engine isn't working optimally or quits on us, we can not pull over to the side of the road and take a look at it. This is the purpose of our engine run-up. It lets us double check everything and make sure things are running correctly before we start flying.
• The Flight
  • Now comes the exciting part! We are finally going to get this bird into the sky. In order to do this, we need to Take Off. We'll talk a little bit about what will be expected when you put the power in and go over the procedure used to get ourselves into the sky.
  • The flight portion will be a bit shorter on the first flight or two due to the time spent on the ground, but things we'll be experiencing will include how the airplane reacts when we do certain things, communication, and various safety items and how to avoid problems.
  • Ok, so now we're flying. I know you will want to stay up here all day, but unfortunately the old adage "what goes up must come down" holds true for us. This being said, we'll introduce the landing process.
• After the Flight
  • This may sound as simple as turning off the engine and getting on with our day, but there are certain things that must be done to an aircraft before you can walk away from it. This list would include the Tie Down. We would like the plane to be in the same place we left it when we come back to it, so we'll talk about how Ace Flight School likes our planes to be properly Post-Flighted.
  • Finally, we'll wrap things up by getting any questions and/or concerns out of the way, talk about how the lesson went, and then talk about what to expect on the next lesson.

I hope this eased the anxiety of the first couple of flights a little bit. Now that you know what to expect you can just think about the excitement of being up in the sky, high above your day-to-day problems.

We look forward to making your Dream Come True!