Life in New Zealand

We have now been in New Zealand best part of two weeks, and its definitely easy to see the appeal of this place. Life seems so much more laid back and the people are really friendly. The scenery is pretty good too. Yesterday I wasn't rostered for any "events" (sim sessions, mass briefs, flying) so I went for a walk up one of the nearby mountains. This provided excellent views across North Island, as well as some much needed excercise.

The view from Mt Pirongia

It was nice to take the time to go and explore, as free time will be quite hard to come by over here due to quite a tight schedule. However my first lesson is coming up soon (this weekend hopefully) which I am really looking forward to. It has been best part of eight months since I last flew, so it will be great to get my hands on the controls again.

You may remember in my last post I mentioned doing some more exams. Well we all passed both the NZ PPL Air Law and NZ differences exams with ease. Having spent a week in the classroom learning these two subjects, guess what, more time in a classroom. We had two more days in the classroom for the first bunch of mass briefs. These are briefings preparing us for the next few flying lessons. The first ones were about general flying skills preparing us for what we are going to be learning during our first couple of lessons, which happen to be in the simulator this weekend. As the MPL (multi-crew pilot license) is taught differently to the traditional ATPL (airline transport pilot license), we spend four lessons in the simulator getting to grips with basic aircraft handling while learning how to use the Garmin 1000 glass cockpit instrument system, similar to what we will be using at an airline.

Living in the CTC accommodation over here is great. It has a really good communal feel about it, with spacious rooms, good facilities and barbeques at each block. So while the weather here has been very warm and sunny we have certainly made the most of cheap meat and barbeques.

Well that's it for the time being, I should go and read the training manual for tomorrow's lesson.