Goodson, Eric E., Carolina Balloon Association Newsletter, Volume 14, #2, March/April, 1995.
It was dark, early, about 6 AM, January 7th, 1995 in Raleigh, NC. It was warm for an early January morning, and a strong south wind was blowing. One of the strongest wind gusts to ever hit Goldsboro, NC was recording just 5 hours earlier at 146 MPH! Goldsboro was my destination (would the wind blow me off the road?).
I drove down US 70, a little nervous that I was going to be spending about 20 hours in the Liberty Balloons Ground School and then, after that, I would attempt to take the FAA's Private Written Exam, all within the next 38 hours! I had heard rumors that the exam could take as long as 4 hours! Whew, was this going to be a hard couple of days!
At around 7 AM or so, I arrived at a non-descript masonry brick building on the west side of Goldsboro, right on the highway. It was here that the class was to be held, in a small conference room just inside the front entrance. I met Caroll Teitsworth, the instructor for the ground school. He seemed fairly nice at first meeting. Here to take the ground school was his son.
Ultimately, seven of us showed up to take the class (five from the CBA!) It was good to know most of the class, because it made it that much more fun!
For the remainder of the day Saturday (to about 7:30pm) and most of Sunday (7 am to 5 pm) we flew through mountains of information! It was so much, I was surprised my brain didn't hurt! We focused on aviation weather, FAR's (mostly 61. and 91.), navigation (in particular, reading sectionals and understanding airspace classifications). We touch on balloon specifics at the end (such as propane, lift calculations and such). All in all, I felt ready to take the test by the end of it.
Micheal Fehnel (a fellow member of TABS) and I decided to take the FAA private test at 5pm that afternoon. We rushed over to the test site just east of downtown Goldsboro. The test center was located in the back of a small brick house there. We walked in and after signing a form, we sat in small cubicles at a PC. The PC was running the Windows operating system and had been set up already in the testing software.
The test itself was very easy to take. It amounted to 60 questions on a variety of topics, all of which we had studied in the ground school. Each question was multiple choice with 3 possible answers. We were also given a small workbook that had many of the charts and graphs refered to in the test. I breezed through about 50 questions in about 15 minutes, feeling very comfortable that I had gotten those right. I was a bit surprised to find myself that far along so quickly, but again, we had covered all of the information in detail in just the last two days. I took a second pass in which I answered seven more with reasonable confidance (this was another 15 minutes). At that point I was down to 3 questions. For two of them, I did not know the answer (primarily because they seemed to have no relevence to ballooning and where fairly obscure regulation type questions. I guessed at these. That left me with a final question, which, my first impression was right, but I screwed up and changed my mind. The question was, if you are interested:
a) Clear skies with winds under 10 knots.
b) Small Cumulus buildup with winds under 10 knots.
c) Stratus overcast with winds under 5 knots.
I ultimately read to much into the question. The answer is c. Most everybody I talk to tend to want to answer a.
Anyway, I missed that one, a two others (one of the guesses), and another that I thought I knew. Final score - 95! I can't complain. Mike also scored a 95.
All in all, I drove home that Sunday night feeling, tired, but very good about the class and the test. I would recommend Caroll's class to anyone! Unfortunately, I found out later that I missed the one flyable weekend day in the entire month of January!
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