My soon to be office

Flight deck lit up at night (dawn to be pedantic) Photo courtesy of Bristol Ground-school

This is where, all being well, I will end up working in approximately thirteen months time.  Now it may look like the Starship Enterprise and with all the electronic and automatic systems in modern aircraft, comparisons to Flight Simulator computer games can be drawn, but this is the office window I have dreamed of for many, many years.

Yesterday brought an end to the Instruments topic, pretty much covering the entire inner workings of the flight deck and getting to grips with how all of those computer screens work. All of this electronic gubbins is actually quite incredible. The flight management system controls the autopilot which can fly and navigate the entire flight, even down to the landing, so us pilot's don't have to do anything more than read the paper and talk to Air Traffic Control! On the face of it, it all seems fairly straightforward, but I dread to think of the complexity of the electrical systems behind the scenes. The two large square screens on the very right of the picture are two of the three most important instruments. The one on the right with a blue top half and brown bottom half is called the Primary Flight display (PFD), and the one left of that with the big splodge of red in the middle is called the Navigation Display (ND). The PFD gives the main flying data, airspeed, altitude, vertical speed and an attitude indicator known as an artificial horizon. The ND, as the name suggests, provides aircraft navigation. It's the flying version of a Sat Nav which can also display weather obtained from the on-board radar and collision avoidance from something called TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System). The majority of the other lights you can see in the picture are autopilot controls.

Our job as a pilot is to monitor this bank of screens and make sure that nothing goes wrong, and deal with it when it does. It has been really interesting to learn how all of the computers work and finally understand what is going on when watching videos on youtube or playing flight simulator. It's also been pretty motivating to be honest. It really feels like I am close to getting my paws on the airbus!