Working on a Story · 12:51am Jan 16th, 2012
Dunno who is going to see this, don't much care.
I'm working on a Story about Scootaloo's Flight Training, and I'm trying to write it a lot like the real thing. My biggest issues are character naming. I have a protagonist and a CFI, but I need some more characters to round out the story. Specifically a Chief Flight instructor (like a headmaster at a school, basically. I've hashed out his character traits pretty well, I need names more than anything else!), a antagonist student/instructor combo, and a few others to round out the mix.
Basically, flight training in the real world goes something like this.
Students are tied to an instructor, sometimes for the entirely of their training. Instructors can have multiple students, but students only have one CFI. Usually, the CFI does both ground and flight lessons, but occasionally at larger schools the students are taught ground training by one CFI in a traditional classroom, and then taught in the airplane by another CFI. The student progresses through initial How-not-to-die-in-an-airplane training (straight and level flight, climbs, descents, turns), then learns to land (by this, I mean they sit in a traffic pattern for hours and land the airplane until the instructor thinks they're not going to kill themselves Seriously, I must have done 2-300 landings just takeoff, go around the pattern, land, before my solo). Then they solo. Now that the instructor is convinced that the student isn't going to kill them, they start venturing out, doing maneuvers required to pass your checkride, doing cross-country flights (not literally, but actually going places), and all the while building confidence in the airplane. Then they do their checkride, and then they can fly. There are additional ratings one can get, but I wont cover those here.
I have a general idea of how this can be ponified, but hashing it out is going to take time. I'm going deep, and I need to go deeper, into physics of pegasi flight. (trust me, I could fill up a blackboard with their lift-generation alone, I've put a lot of thought into this) Not to mention the lessons themselves. I have a little excerpt of a early ground school lesson that I threw together to see if the characters would fit:
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Ground School: Day One
“So,” Rainbow Dash asked, looking at the mess of a diagram she hoofed on the blackboard, “What are the four forces of flight?”
Scootaloo looked at the ceiling, hoping that somepony had written them up there. They hadn’t. “Um.. Lift....” She thought for a second, “Weight..... And I can’t remember the other two.”
Rainbow Dash sighed with frustration, and wrote the words ‘Lift’ and ‘Weight’ on the top and bottom of the badly drawn flying pony on the board. “Well, there’s two. Obviously Lift is the force that keeps us in the air, and Weight is the force trying to pull us out of it. The other two are called ‘Thrust’,” She wrote it on the board in front off the deformed creature, “and ‘Drag’. Thrust moves us forward, while Drag pulls us back.”
Scootaloo thought about this for a second, and then the lightbulb went off. “So, then, if all four forces are equal, then we will be hovering in midair?”
“Sort of, let me give you an example. If you are moving through the air at a set speed and altitude, your weight is equal to the lift your wings are producing, and the drag across your body is equal to the thrust you are making. Does that make sense?”
Scootaloo’s face scrunched up, and then relaxed. “I guess...”
Rainbow breathed a sigh of relief, hopefully this was getting through the filly’s thick skull. “Awesome. Now, let’s go out to the practice area and see if we can put all this mumbo-jumbo theory into practice.”
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All in all, I think this will be a fun project, hoping for Chapter One in a few days, maybe a week!
Biscayne
