This was our last lecture class. Next week is a review and final exam.
We talked briefly about preflight planning, including getting weather briefings and NOTAMS, filing a flight plan, opening and closing the flight plan, and what happens if you forget to close a flight plan. If you don’t close a flight plan, the feds initiate a search and rescue. The whole point of a flight plan is so that somebody knows where you’re going and thus will know where to look if you don’t get there.
The rest of the class was more flight planning practice. We were given departure and arrival airports, weather information and aircraft performance information and had to come up with all of the details: magnetic heading (corrected for winds forecast), cruise altitude, ground speed, en route time, required fuel, and other such things. This stuff is fun to me. Maps and math; I look forward to doing it for real.