How to fly an Airbus upside down

We havn't specifically been taught to do this, but the last few sessions have been about Upset Recovery. This is all based around recovering the aircraft from undesirable attitudes and states if you happen to find yourself in one. As a bit of fun in a very "don't-try-this-at-home" moment our instructor gave us a go a trying to roll the airbus upside down.

Flying the Airbus upside down

The three UPART (Upset and Recovery Training) sessions were carried out in both Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 simulators. They also gave us our first experience of full motion. The motion is great as it does just enough to give the feel of an actual airplane. It is by no means perfect, but it is rather good. The UPART training however was great fun, consisting of lots of unusual attitudes to recover from and really just an excuse to throw the aircraft about the sky.

Boeing 737-800W cockpit

Now as I have experience both Boeing and Airbus I feel slightly more qualified to compare the two. The 737 is a nice aircraft to fly. It handles well and is quite nice and smooth on the controls. It flies just like any other airplane, just has all the qualities of a jet (to be expected). However, having been treated to the Airbus and it's fancy wizardry, it is hard to want to fly anything else. It feels more ergonomic, spacious and the auto-trim in normal simply makes us lazy. A few of us have come to the conclusion that the Boeing is a nice aircraft, but as an office and a place of work the Airbus is superior. Sorry Boeing fans!

Since then we have starting the non-normal and emergency procedures training. This has involved engine failures, Rejected take-offs (RTO's) and simple ECAM (electronic centralised aircraft management) drills.Unsurprisingly the airbus makes it quite straightforward to deal with emergencies as the ECAM tells you what to do half the time. Plus when the engine fails, there isn't huge amount flight control correction you need to make. The passengers, at least, wouldn't know the difference in the cabin.

That's it for the time being, I'm going to enjoy my week off!

The Airbus

I apologise for the lack of updates in the last month. Scheduling is more like at an airline now with simulator sessions at any hour of the day, any day of the week. We are now about half way through what is called the "Basic Phase" consisting of twenty nine simulator sessions including some Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (UPART), some "conventional jet handling" in the Boeing 737 simulator and a lot of time in the Airbus A320 simulator.

One of easyJet's A320 family

The Airbus is a strange but loveable creature. Once you get used to the different way of flying (managing) this aircraft it's soon easy to fall in love with it. At first it all seems very complicated. The fly-by-wire system means that you don't control the flying surfaces but in fact control one of seven computers that interprets your input and translates that to an action applied to the control surfaces of the aircraft. Being a heavier and faster aircraft than we are used to, it takes some practice getting used to the massive amount of inertia that is now present. A certain amount of anticipation is required when doing anything with the airbus as it takes that much longer to do it. For example it takes about eight seconds to deliver full power once the thrust levers have been moved all of the way forward. However, once used to all of these differences, flying the Airbus becomes a delight and, in the words of our instructors, "makes you look like a flying god!"

The Airbus flight deck

As, on this MPL course, we do not do the traditional Instrument Rating (IR), we get to do the majority of our instrument training in the Airbus simulator. Consequently this means that we get a lot more time and hands on flying in the Airbus. Hopefully as with the intention of the MPL we will be completely used to the A320 and feel so much more prepared for life on line at easyJet. Five months cannot come soon enough so we can fly this sixty ton flying machine for real.