My name is Rodney Fielitz, I'm a certified flight instructor in Cottonwood Arizona, and I'm here to give you the basics of what it takes to become a pilot. Okay, now one of the first things that we have to do in pilot training is we try to teach ground school and flight and have them work together, because a lot of our training on the ground, everything correlates with what we do in flying. This is one example of a school book that we do have, there's all kinds of different manuals out there and there's also probably some of the best video tapes that you'll ever find are from the internet and different programs like Sporties and different programs. But what we try to do is teach you the basics of ground instruction. And that's starting out with what makes an airplane fly. So we try to teach you the principles of flight, what are parts of the airplane, what the names of the airplane are called, and then we go out and we go out and do a flight, and we do the same thing over again. But we try to coordinate all our lessons to work simultaneously with our flight department, and a lot of times as a student pilot goes through, you'll find the instructor doesn't necessarily teach the ground school, and they expect the students to do their own ground school. This is fine, and it's a lot easier for a lot of people to do it on their own time, otherwise you have to do a scheduled class. In the beginning, though, would be the basic ground schools, how the airport works, what the runway markings are, what taxi-ways are, and what makes the airplane, when you taxi down the runway or taxi down the taxi-way, what makes the aircraft move. So we cover all of those things, we cover field elevations, and then we talk about the wind directions and the wind indicators, because flying is part of the wind, you have to learn what the winds do to you, weather is a big part of that also.
