by haykinson » Tue Sep 07, 2021 4:39 pm
I found that by getting my PPL and IR in the Los Angeles area, I ended up with some skewed understanding of the real world.
1) After my PPL, I had very little experience with nontowered airports, and felt very intimidated by them. Even now, years later, it still shows in my level of comfort. On the other hand, I really enjoy towered airports and feel good at fitting in with their expectations.
2) Instrument flight planning in SoCal is a bit weird, since we have a lot of TEC routes. This means that a) you don't even need to file instrument flights for a good chunk of SoCal, and can just ask the tower right when you decide to fly, and b) even if you do file, you're almost always getting a TEC route clearance. As far as I know this is something fairly rare in a good chunk of the country, but having this crutch had left me with less practice filing real IFR plans than I'd like.
3) Difficulty of flying published missed procedures. When training, you often want to follow the published missed. In an airport-dense environment, ATC really can't give you that very often as the missed approach for one airport might actually interfere with a real approach to another one. So on one hand, you don't get as much practice with those — but on the other, you get much better at executing one-off instructions from ATC.
I guess this is maybe another way of saying is that no matter what you choose, you'll be a bit deficient in your training, so maybe the best option is to train at the edge of two systems — busy and non-busy — and have you instructor get you very comfortable with both.
I found that by getting my PPL and IR in the Los Angeles area, I ended up with some skewed understanding of the real world.
1) After my PPL, I had very little experience with nontowered airports, and felt very intimidated by them. Even now, years later, it still shows in my level of comfort. On the other hand, I really enjoy towered airports and feel good at fitting in with their expectations.
2) Instrument flight planning in SoCal is a bit weird, since we have a lot of TEC routes. This means that a) you don't even need to file instrument flights for a good chunk of SoCal, and can just ask the tower right when you decide to fly, and b) even if you do file, you're almost always getting a TEC route clearance. As far as I know this is something fairly rare in a good chunk of the country, but having this crutch had left me with less practice filing real IFR plans than I'd like.
3) Difficulty of flying published missed procedures. When training, you often want to follow the published missed. In an airport-dense environment, ATC really can't give you that very often as the missed approach for one airport might actually interfere with a real approach to another one. So on one hand, you don't get as much practice with those — but on the other, you get much better at executing one-off instructions from ATC.
I guess this is maybe another way of saying is that no matter what you choose, you'll be a bit deficient in your training, so maybe the best option is to train at the edge of two systems — busy and non-busy — and have you instructor get you very comfortable with both.