I can no longer see where I'm going

It has been a busy week here in New Zealand. I have had six events in as many days, passing my first professional flight test, completing the first three IFR simulator sessions and fulfilling the night flying requirements of the MPL course.

At the end of our VFR flying training we have something called a Competency Assurance (CA). This is effectively a flight test equivalent to the first progress test that the guys and girls on the wings course have. The CA encompasses most of what we have been taught to date, including navigation, circuits and emergency procedures. It also means that the next time I get a chance to fly solo will be when I get round to taking it up as a hobby again at some point in the future.

At first night flying felt quite uncomfortable. Not being able to see any definition in the ground and being unable to see any of the mountains that surround Hamilton make it quite nerve racking. Once I got over that initial unease the rest of the night flying I have done has been great. During the first flight the instructor took us off for a bit of navigation towards Auckland to give us a feel for navigation in the dark, with just the urban lights of towns and cities that look exactly the same. This also included a trip to the Sky Tower in Auckland for a couple of orbits around the Southern Hemisphere's tallest building, before transiting Auckland's controlled airspace between a landing 737 and a 777 on approach, it's very bright landing light making it look as if it was bearing down on us.

Sky Tower and Auckland City by night (thanks Dean for the photo)

It's very exciting to move onto the next bit of the training and to start learning something new. As enjoyable as the nav flights were, there were a lot of them and most of us were very much looking forward to moving on. One of the best things about this next phase is that we are now not so restrained by NZ's wintery weather.

In the first three sim sessions we have been looking at flying holding patterns using radio navigation aids. All of this has been done in IMC (Instrument Meteorological Conditions) so I have no visual reference to fly to and have to spend the entire time looking at the instruments. It's suprisingly disorientating flying with no visual cues as the human body is very easily tricked into thinking that it is in a different position to the one it really is. This makes flying in cloud very difficult and dangerous. The flying itself is surprisingly straight forward in IFR, but there is just so much more to consider and so much more mental arithmetic that makes it all the more challenging. I like a challenge so roll on the IFR flights we have coming up before we go home.