01/13/2026
A great opportunity for anybody who wants to learn to fly!
“If you know anyone who wants to learn to fly and who loves Massachusetts in January, our three-day FAA ground school class at MIT is free and open to the public (next week, Tuesday-Thursday, 1/20-22). It's a for-credit subject for MIT aero/astro majors with all of the FAA topics plus some of the engineering behind the systems. All required reading materials are free as PDFs. Sign-off for the real test from an FAA-certificated instructor (me!). Sign up at https://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/ground-school/ (you can do it online as well because we had the lectures recorded in 2019).”
The course includes qualitative aerodynamics, airplane and helicopter systems, practical meteorology, navigation and cross-country flight planning, and human factors. We present the FAA-required theory, pose some thought-experiments, and offer practical advice based on instructors' real-world experi...