Introduction

[lizz]

Gentlemen and Ladies perhaps.....


I'm Lizz living in the netherlands and I'm into Flight simming already for many many years. It's not very common for women to be active in this hobby but I was grown with aircraft and flying.
I use to work for Fokker Aircraft as an avionics engineer up till the day they went bankrupt and even 1 year after that in the new company that was raised. Finally I quit and startingg off in a totally different company.
I had my private pilot license for quiet some years but stopped due to funding and personal reasons (family, love and so on....)
The flightsim hobby has always attracted me and I used MSFS for many years and even build 'a kind of' B737 simulator to fly in. MSFS was driving me crazy so I started off with X-plane which I love very much. I even started to re-build my 'old' cockpit to a more generic PFC MFD like construction.
Now I just took the try-out membership as I would like to fly online and practice ATC skills of which I do not have very much. I have some IVAO experience in Europe but that's all and no US experience at all.
So, I'm a bit lost as to where to begin, I'm currently studying the FAA manuals that came with my Foreflight subscription just to get some more in-depth knowledge of the US airspace structure.
Any help or direction I can get to fly online would be nice. I downloaded the X-plane plugin and installed it, I bought myself a nice headset but still I'm a bit scared to go online and just...well... start off!
I knew from the past that at IVAO the rules are somewhat loose making it easier to just go online and see what happens. But here at PE is looks more professional and demanding.
One other issue to overcome is the fact that it seems to be quite different to fly in the US systems compared with the European system, or isn't it?
And....I'm not native english, so sometimes it's difficult to understand what is being said.
Where to start??

Best regards,

Lizz
Netherlands

[lwilliams]

Great to see you here, Lizz.

I was once very new also to this and found that going through the training ratings was a great place to learn the PilotEdge system and California geography.

I have always found the controllers pretty helpful and this should help your transition.

Hope to see you around!!!!

Lee

[Keith Smith]

Welcome, Lizz, we have a number of pilots who are based in Europe, so you are not alone. We have a number of female pilots, too. In fact, there are 5 from one family alone.

I would strongly suggest listening to our daily ATC recordings and trying our pilot training program in the Pilot Center section of the site. The atc transcripts will likely be of interest to you.

We are working on some workshops which will include airspace primers and communication reviews.

You can peruse sectional and TAC charts at skyvector.com and through foreflight.

If you have questions in the mean time, feel free.