Sporty's Pilot Training

I just recently hired a CFI to get my flight time for my Private Pilot Certificate, and here is his advice as a pilot for 11 years: “Learning to fly a plane is 10% in the plane, and 90% in the classroom.” This app leads you through everything. Preflight, Engine Function, Flight Tools, Radio Communications, Takeoffs and Landings, Straight and Level, and Emergency Situations. The really fun part about learning on this app is that everything you learn is immediately applicable in your next flight lesson, whenever it may be. Being able to do ground school whenever is so convenient, and it isn’t like Duolingo where you get bored and don’t come back to it for a month. Once you start, you’re hooked (or at least that’s how it was for me). Also, for any that are worried about certain aspects of flying, i.e. Radio communication and dangerous weather, it has courses that go into that in further detail so that you can become a professional in those areas. ——————————————————————— Dear Sporty’s A great way to improve the Private Pilot lessons would be to include an option for the student to choose either Diamond, Cirrus, or Cessna before the videos that entail the startup of the aircraft and flight tool configuration. This would help with giving students more confidence and reduce the lost feeling that some get when they get in a cockpit that isn’t a Cessna like in the videos. Hope that all makes sense, thanks.

For whatever reason the developers of this app store any videos downloaded for offline use in the app’s “documents” directory, meaning that they’ll be automatically be backed up to iCloud as part of iOS’s iCloud backup feature. This is not only a waste of iCloud storage space (I can download the videos again via the app if necessary), but in my case it prevented iOS from backing up altogether as uploading 6GB of instrument training videos over my slow DSL connection would take an eternity. I’m very lucky that nothing happened to my iPad in the weeks between downloading the videos and iOS notifying me of the lack of completed backups, as it very likely would have resulted in losing important data. Additionally, the offline download functionality is poorly implemented. Want to download all videos in a given section? The app will begin downloading all videos at once, leading to it taking an eternity for even a single video to complete. What’s more, if you switch away from the app for more than a moment or two, the video downloads are interrupted and you’ll need to manually start them again. And start again they will. Even if the video was 90% downloaded, an interrupted download will start over from scratch. This means that on all but the fastest connections you’re forced to sit and keep your device awake to let the download complete, lest you be forced to start the download over again.

I bought this to supplement a cheaper PPL ground school that I went thru before I knew anything about aviation. I wish I would have started with Sporty’s. The training is so well done and easy to understand. However I would recommend going directly to their website to buy the courses instead of using the Apple in app purchase. I ran into an issue where progress would not sync to their server and ended up losing many hours of work because I didn’t have a sporty’s account logged in at the time of the in app purchase. It was frustrating and customer service had to help resolve. I don’t think it would have happened if I had just bought it directly from their web portal. They really need to fix their app to handle this situation its a big hole in the system and I’m sure I’m not the only one who fell in it.