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.