Sure. Happy to do so.
Last few days was much of the same. Met at 8:30a and basically pulled open Foreflight and just plotted random airports in some distance. Usually looked for at least 30nm or so between airports so I could get established in cruise and then start looking down at approach charts, weather, setting radios up, etc. Tried to mix in untowered and towered fields in. Looked for maybe 4 to 6 airports depending on distance to come up with about 1.5+ hrs in flight and adding in about 10 mins per approach to net out at around 2.x hours of flying.
At first, instructor was going most of the planning and the radio work. And by the time we hit 5th day, I was doing it all. We were at some point starting to plan flights just to hit the requires flight hours. SIM time up to 10 hours can be used, but I found SIM time to not be that interesting and frankly preferred to do more of it in the air. We generally would end up at an airport that we optimized for food, transportation, and cheap fuel so we could eat lunch and then plan a longer ride back to Manhattan. By the end, I think we shot approaches in Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
Net takeaway still stands as before. I was able to set aside to week from my normal life. Without it, I doubt I would have been able to get the time in. I did schedule some work conference calls in the morning and at noon so our lunches were a bit longer than they otherwise would be, but the fluidity and flexibility of the instructor to just go with the flow was nice. We really had no schedule and no agenda flying wise other than doing as much random and variable stuff as we could fly.
I tried to get as much actual IMC time as possible so we would make altitude change requests to fly in the muck whenever possible and also would chase MVMC and IFR weather if we could find it - more often then not, by the time we got there, the weather was often much better than METARS or TAFS were indicating.
I had no trouble with the radios since I do fly out of class D airport and use FF quite a bit. I didn't find any of the radio work to be any different.
I also found Foreflight and esp georeferenced approach plates to almost be "cheating." DPE even encouraged use and didn't fail my iPad though I was expecting him to do so. He also encouraged used of the AP while starting at my charts and even had me to do the RNAV approach on an autopilot.
I believe I have no worn a nice groove in my seat from all of the seat time during a very compressed amount of time.
. And, maybe psychological, but I honestly feel like my engine is smoother than it was before this all started.
Anyway, my opinion still stands. Get it done in a week and go fly with GATTS. Don't expect much on transportation and the apartment. It has only the VERY basics. Go in to GATTS with the knowledge stuff pretty fresh. And, know how to fly your airplane already - they won't teach you that. If you have those things down, then the course is really about getting the time in and understanding how to fly those charts.
