A rather exciting week

Our New Zealand Visa application forms have arrived and we have been given the dates of travel out to the other side of the world (dependent on passing the next set of exams).

New Zealand Visa Application form

It's rather exciting that in almost exactly two months we will be embarking on the horrendous 30 hour flight down to New Zealand. Before that though there is the "small" matter of sitting and passing the next seven exams.

This week has been spent looking at factors that negatively effect the performance of pilots. I have found it to be quite an interesting subject and relatively medically based. A lot of it is fairly straightforward, i.e. consuming alcohol before flying is bad and some basic anatomy. I hated biology at school and never thought that I would have to use any of what I learned all those years ago again, but it has actually come in surprisingly handy for some of the stuff we have been learning. Other things that we have been studying are optics, psychology, hypoxia and the depressing air crash investigation videos.

It has been quite depressing watching them, but they have been eye opening to some of unforeseen circumstances and errors that humans can make while flying the highly strung, complicated machines that modern aircraft are. The most famous and harrowing incident in recent times is that of Air France flight 447 which crashed in the middle of the Atlantic in 2009. A tragic incident which shows that it is quite easy for pilots to get into a state of confusion if something out of the ordinary happens. I find it good to watch these videos so that we at least have an appreciation for past incidents and so we can learn from them. It hasn't just been this subject that AF447 has cropped up. It's a good example to illustrate a number of lessons that should be taken on-board by all pilots, in training or experienced, for example why thunderstorms are to be avoided.

Learning from experience is also something for you to think about if you are going through selection processes. One of the things interviewers look for is for you to demonstrate that you have learned from some of your mistakes and feedback you may have been given at times.

On that cheery note, I wish you a Happy Christmas. I hope you all have a lovely festive period.

Preparation is everything

In aviation preparation is nearly everything. Life is made significantly easier if you prepare well for a flight, and as such makes the task of transporting passengers safer. The last couple of weeks we have been studying Mass and Balance and Flight Planning. These two modules really carry on the theme of being able to see the practical use outside the classroom. Admittedly as airline pilots, a lot of this will be done for us, but it is necessary to understand what is done in order to get a flight ready for departure. We will have to do this out in New Zealand anyway, and if we ever do any general aviation flying.

Mass and Balance is another small topic but is a very important one. It is because of this subject that airlines have strict rules on your luggage. Adding weight to the aircraft causes an increase in fuel usage as well as changing the CofG (centre of gravity) of the aircraft. According to the design specifications and safety regulations the CofG must be kept within certain location limits on the aircraft to keep it flyable. There are also more of those horrible looking graphs to learn how to use, but once you understand what's going on it's all fairly straightforward.

Flight planning, funnily enough, involves planning a flight, from routing and navigation to calculating the amount of fuel to uplift.There is a lot of reference material for this one with even more charts and graphs. There is not a huge amount of facts to learn in this subject, as most of it is contained in the Jeppesen manual or the CAP documents, so it's a case of knowing where to find the information. For example we have been learning how to read Instrument approach plates (seen below).

Approach plate for Southampton ILS/DME RWY20

Approach plates show the procedure to follow while making an approach for landing into an airport while flying under IFR (instrument flight rules) normally done in poor visibility, or by Airlines. Above you can see an example of an approach plate, this one being for Runway 20 at Southampton.

For those of you embarking on assessment days in the future, being prepared will help you enormously. My advice on this matter would be to make a list of scenarios and skills they could ask you about and write down everything about yourself, with examples, that could answer their questions. Being prepared definitely helped me with my easyJet assessment days, and I learned my lesson by not being so during my previous attempt at getting into a pilot training program.

There is no rest for the wicked here as there are still three subjects to go, so for now its back to the graphs.

Exam Performance

This week has been a combination of the nerve racking receipt of exam results as well learning about aircraft performance. Firstly, I'm happy to report that I passed all of my exams and achieved a good average, so I'm pretty pleased and as such enjoyed an evening at the pub with my housemates for a celebratory drink, or two! The results of the group as a whole were really good, and it's great to see a few months hard work pay off. Now we just have to repeat that success and it's off to the other side of the world.

In the mean time though, the performance subject that we have now finished, has been making our brains ache. It is only four days of teaching, but there is one heck of a lot of information to take in. It's a cross between Principles of Flight and Air Law focusing on achieving performance regulations and calculating the performance of an aircraft under specified conditions. This means that there are lots more seemingly arbitrary numbers to store in the ether of our brains. For example, if a runway is wet, a jet aircraft should stop within 52% of the runway length. This module also contains lots of graphs with which we can work out all manner of things from required take-off distances to ideal flap setting for landing.  The graph below is one of the graphics studied, used to calculate the take off distance of a single engine aircraft with flaps up.

Figure 2.1 from CAP 698

All this means the wholly enjoyable (tedious!) task of reading through the regulatory requirements of CAP698 (the document containing aircraft performance requirements) and learning how to use the multitude of graphs within. The practicality of this subject is often labour intensive, and achieving the required accuracy takes more concentration than usual, but it's quite nice learning about something that is going to be part of our preparation every time we go flying. It's quite difficult doing five months of ground-school with nothing to reference our learning to, but this second set of subjects helps to put some of the theory already examined into practice.

That's about all that is interesting from the past couple of weeks, so until next time, take care.