Before I taught my first private pilot ground school I was warned to keep the paper copy of the Federal Aviation Regulations/Aeronautical Information Manual (FAR/AIM) out of sight until everyone who had signed up for the class had paid the $400 tuition and purchased the $395 ground school kit that was essentially a cloth flight bag containing an E6-B, plotter, the Airplane Flying Handbook, the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, and the FAR/AIM.
Once all of them had paid the bags were handed out, and they were allowed to open them. Why was there such production? According to the chief ground instructor, there was something about the size of the FAR/AIM—it was over 2 inches thick with relatively small print and instilled panic in the students.
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The sheer volume of information in the pages still puts fear into the hearts of many aspiring aviators, some of whom somewhat timidly ask, “How much of this do we have to know?” which is occassionally followed by, “What if we don’t like to read?”
The FAR/AIM is a reference tool, not something to be memorized. In paper form it’s large and heavy, which may be why so many face-to-face ground schools now use digital editions of it that can be downloaded for free from the FAA website or obtained for a price as PDFs from aviation apps or publishers such as ASA (Aviation Supplies & Academics).
While the digital version of the FAR/AIM is much easier to carry, update, and search (type in a term and swipe versus thumbing through physical pages), there are some people who do better with the tactile experience of holding a book in their hands for learning to take place.
I am one of those pilots who obtains a hard copy of the book, in addition to having the latest digital edition accessible on my tablet. This time of year I secure an updated hard copy version of the book and spend part of a day going through the new edition, adding tabs made from repurposed business cards from a now defunct flight school.
By now I know what I will be frequently referencing, for example, cFAR 61.87: Solo requirements for student pilots.
When I get my hands on the hard copy, I spend the better part of an afternoon reading the summary of major FAR changes since the last FAR/AIM was published, then I put tabs on the book so I can find important and frequently referenced regulations and information quickly. The latter is often done as a ground lesson with a client. A big part of being an instructor is modeling good habits, and when the CFI puts in the effort to tab the book, the client is more likely to respect the importance of knowing where to look up the information.
I know there are companies that sell pre-tabbed versions of the book, but I prefer doing the work myself. It is something I look forward to in the same way I do watching the annual television broadcast of The Wizard of Oz. Just as I have fond memories of the movie (it was a family event), I have warm recollections of learning to tab the FAR/AIM and discussions in ground school about which FARs a private, instrument, and commercial pilot must know.
Don’t neglect the AIM part of the book. Chapter 4 (Air Traffic Control) and Chapter 5 (Traffic Procedures) are a must-read for fledgling pilots.
Chapter 7, which covers meteorology, is a favorite. I have lost count of how many times I have referred to the PIREP (pilot report) script printed there or how many times I have printed out section 7-1-7 (Categorical Outlook) and given it to the flight school dispatcher who was not a pilot but knew how to listen to the automated weather.
When a customer called and asked if the weather was flyable, the dispatcher pulled up the ATIS/AWOS on the computer, hit the “decode” button then compared it to the definitions in 7-1-7. It cut down on the number of students who made the trip out to the airport after being told “it looks pretty good” only to discover that the ceiling was below VFR.
Buried Under Info
In the 1980s when someone would share too much information (usually of a personal nature), the accepted response was “TMI,” or too much information. It was slang for “I don’t need to know this.”
Aviation has a different version of this. We have so many options for information now, especially when accessing a weather briefing with an app such as ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, Aviation Weather.com, etc. that you often find yourself facing pages and pages not necessarily pertinent to your mission METARS and TAFs.
Too much information buries the fledgling and not-so-fledgling pilot, and in worst cases, can make the pilot reluctant to put in more than a perfunctory effort to gather more than perfunctory information before a flight.
As a student pilot you don’t know what you don’t know, or what’s important to know before a flight. This is a perfect time to have a ground session with your CFI to help you get a grasp on what is pertinent to the average mission.
This is particularly true when the briefing contains multiple pages of NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen) about things that really don’t factor into your mission—for example, canceled NOTAMs about taxiway closures or runway weight limitations that don’t affect your mighty Cessna 172. Going over the information with your CFI is a great way to determine what information is critical to the mission, what is nice to have, and what you can ignore.
If you run across an acronym you’ve never seen before, Appendix 3 of the AIM can help you decode it. Most of the time.
The exception was the day “ROSNOT” appeared in the remarks section of the weather report from a remote nontowered airport in Northern California. At the time, weather was reported by the airport manager or someone designated by them, often a retired military pilot.
Unable to find ROSNOT in the AIM and with the graybeards at the airport coming up blank, two handfuls of quarters were dumped into the pay phone (yes, this was that long ago) to call the airport manager who had filed the report. ROSNOT stood for “Rattlesnake On Step. No Observation Taken.”
Learning took place.
