A feeling of emptiness

After five months of hard work (and stress) the ground-school phase has come to an end. Yesterday we finished our last exam, HPL. With this, today brings a rather pleasant feeling of calm (admittedly everyone's hangovers from last night has a part to play in that) and emptiness as we have nothing to do. The last few weeks of stress have now paved way for the excitement of our trip to New Zealand. We received our tickets earlier this week which started to make it all seem a little more real. However there is still some anxiety over the exam results which are yet to be made available to us.

In my time off, I thought I would reflect on ground-school a little and give you all a concluding view of the first hurdle to becoming an airline pilot.

• Have I enjoyed it?

Yes I have. It's been very hard work, and very time consuming, but I knew what I was letting myself in for and training to be a pilot is something that I really want to do. Having a genuine interest in what we were learning as helped a lot. It lessens the feeling of necessity and helps to motivate yourself to study and work as best you can. Having a background in a Maths and physics based subjects has helped too, meaning that underlying principles I already understand and have not had to learn from scratch.

• The teaching

The instructors have been excellent. They have really tried there best to get us all to the same level of knowledge and have presented the lessons in a well structured and engaging manner. Some of the subjects not so much, but they are naturally boring and hard to teach resulting in us just wanting to use the question bank.

• Free time

What free time? On our first day, a group cadets at the stage we are at now said that you basically have to write off five months of your life. To be honest it's not that bad, but there is very little time to waste. Taking a day off now and then is absolutely necessary for your sanity but if you work hard there is just about enough time in which to relax, see friends and family and take your mind off things.

• Is it difficult and what to expect?

The subjects themselves are not difficult to learn, especially with the resources made available to us. The difficulty is the amount of material there is to learn in the relatively short space of time. If you put the effort in then it is perfectly manageable. So what to expect? Well you'll be in lessons 9-4 most days and expect to study for a few more hours each evening and at weekends. Oh, and make sure you get a comfortable chair. You'll be spending a lot of time in it. 

For the time being though I'm going to enjoy the next couple of weeks, I'll let you know when I get to New Zealand with a few photos of my trip. As ever feel free to ask any questions.

Left is right, right is left

Happy New Year everyone. This week saw the end of 2013, as well as our Human Performance and Limitations subject. I have found it a very interesting subject, even though a lot of it is basic anatomy. Biology was never my strong point at school, and I never cared for it either. I was surprised though, at just how useful my GCSE Biology has been in understanding some of this subject.

Monday brought us a visitor to class. An aviation medical expert came to talk to us about illusions and how even some of the most simple things while flying can/will cause pilots to suffer from sensory illusions. This included much more discussion on past accidents and their causes, as well as a fun ending in which we all took turns to try on a pair of goggles that reversed our vision. Much hilarity ensued as we all stumbled across the room making it look as if we had had a few too many drinks.

In the last two days we have started our final subject, Radio Navigation. Its quite daunting yet exciting that in just over a month we will have finished ground school and are enjoying a couple of weeks relaxing before going to the other side of the world. Anyway, Radio Navigation teaches us about radio communication and radio navigation aids such as VOR (Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range), NDB (Non-Directional Beacon) and GPS, among others. It's another topic where A-level physics and my degree have come in useful in helping to understand some of the science. I've also found it rather captivating, helped by the excellent teaching, for the reason that we are learning about something that we will use so regularly and that underpins most navigation of aircraft around the sky. It is interesting to finally understand how all of this works having tried to grasp it in my free time before even enrolling on this course.

I'm afraid that's it for now until my mock exams in two weeks time, but I will keep you updated on anything exciting that happens. There are murmurings of a go in the simulator again, but we will have to see. We still haven't been in since the last time there were murmurings. For now I wish you all the best for the New Year!

A rather exciting week

Our New Zealand Visa application forms have arrived and we have been given the dates of travel out to the other side of the world (dependent on passing the next set of exams).

New Zealand Visa Application form

It's rather exciting that in almost exactly two months we will be embarking on the horrendous 30 hour flight down to New Zealand. Before that though there is the "small" matter of sitting and passing the next seven exams.

This week has been spent looking at factors that negatively effect the performance of pilots. I have found it to be quite an interesting subject and relatively medically based. A lot of it is fairly straightforward, i.e. consuming alcohol before flying is bad and some basic anatomy. I hated biology at school and never thought that I would have to use any of what I learned all those years ago again, but it has actually come in surprisingly handy for some of the stuff we have been learning. Other things that we have been studying are optics, psychology, hypoxia and the depressing air crash investigation videos.

It has been quite depressing watching them, but they have been eye opening to some of unforeseen circumstances and errors that humans can make while flying the highly strung, complicated machines that modern aircraft are. The most famous and harrowing incident in recent times is that of Air France flight 447 which crashed in the middle of the Atlantic in 2009. A tragic incident which shows that it is quite easy for pilots to get into a state of confusion if something out of the ordinary happens. I find it good to watch these videos so that we at least have an appreciation for past incidents and so we can learn from them. It hasn't just been this subject that AF447 has cropped up. It's a good example to illustrate a number of lessons that should be taken on-board by all pilots, in training or experienced, for example why thunderstorms are to be avoided.

Learning from experience is also something for you to think about if you are going through selection processes. One of the things interviewers look for is for you to demonstrate that you have learned from some of your mistakes and feedback you may have been given at times.

On that cheery note, I wish you a Happy Christmas. I hope you all have a lovely festive period.

Preparation is everything

In aviation preparation is nearly everything. Life is made significantly easier if you prepare well for a flight, and as such makes the task of transporting passengers safer. The last couple of weeks we have been studying Mass and Balance and Flight Planning. These two modules really carry on the theme of being able to see the practical use outside the classroom. Admittedly as airline pilots, a lot of this will be done for us, but it is necessary to understand what is done in order to get a flight ready for departure. We will have to do this out in New Zealand anyway, and if we ever do any general aviation flying.

Mass and Balance is another small topic but is a very important one. It is because of this subject that airlines have strict rules on your luggage. Adding weight to the aircraft causes an increase in fuel usage as well as changing the CofG (centre of gravity) of the aircraft. According to the design specifications and safety regulations the CofG must be kept within certain location limits on the aircraft to keep it flyable. There are also more of those horrible looking graphs to learn how to use, but once you understand what's going on it's all fairly straightforward.

Flight planning, funnily enough, involves planning a flight, from routing and navigation to calculating the amount of fuel to uplift.There is a lot of reference material for this one with even more charts and graphs. There is not a huge amount of facts to learn in this subject, as most of it is contained in the Jeppesen manual or the CAP documents, so it's a case of knowing where to find the information. For example we have been learning how to read Instrument approach plates (seen below).

Approach plate for Southampton ILS/DME RWY20

Approach plates show the procedure to follow while making an approach for landing into an airport while flying under IFR (instrument flight rules) normally done in poor visibility, or by Airlines. Above you can see an example of an approach plate, this one being for Runway 20 at Southampton.

For those of you embarking on assessment days in the future, being prepared will help you enormously. My advice on this matter would be to make a list of scenarios and skills they could ask you about and write down everything about yourself, with examples, that could answer their questions. Being prepared definitely helped me with my easyJet assessment days, and I learned my lesson by not being so during my previous attempt at getting into a pilot training program.

There is no rest for the wicked here as there are still three subjects to go, so for now its back to the graphs.

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.

How to get from A to B

Another week has ended and more knowledge has been consumed. This week we have been studying General Navigation, a topic based on calculations navigating us around the globe from A to B. So it's all pretty important stuff. Now that the topics are more practical, we have been given the Jeppesen Airway Manual. This hefty binder contains all the charts that we need to complete the exams. There is a range of charts in this manual including airway (motorways of the sky) charts and airport charts showing taxiways, terminals and gates.

Jeppesen airway manual and one of the included low level airway charts

The majority of what we have done so far has been learning about longitude and latitude, Great circles (the shortest distance across the globe) and rhumb lines (lines that cross each meridian at the same angle). This involves looking at different types of charts and the various properties of each one. This all becomes of use when working out where we are and where we need to go. In the picture above you can see some thick lines criss-crossing seemingly randomly across the page. These lines are in fact airways and follow great circle lines from radio-navigation aids. In light aircraft with basic equipment these lines and angles aren't the ones displayed on the instrument so we need to know how to convert them to useful headings and bearings for us to navigate accurately. The modern highly automated aircraft that I will be flying day to day will do all of this for me, but during training, in light aircraft, flight planning and when it all goes wrong this knowledge will probably come in quite handy.

The CRP-5

We have also started learning how to use the CRP-5 flight computer. It's affectionately know as the "crap 5", but in all honesty its a brilliant piece of equipment that saves time on numerous calculations such as fuel unit conversions and wind, velocity, track and heading calculations. At first it's quite a daunting thing to use but like most things once you get the hang of it, it becomes far easier and far more useful. It's also known as a whizz wheel because the centre of it rotates enabling the plethora of calculations that it is capable of. Admittedly its not as accurate as a calculator, but its much quicker and the value obtained is close enough to real answer for it to be used in flight.

We have another week of this before moving on, so until then Adios!

Exams are over, for now!

Exams are finished, beer has been consumed and everyone is feeling a lot happier than 12 hours ago. Three months have passed incredibly quickly, which I personally see as a good thing as it means we are three months closer to our rather exciting trip to New Zealand.  It's nice that the exams are now out the way for a few much needed days of relaxation. But a few days is just that, as we are back in the classroom on Tuesday to start the process all over again. According to instructors and previous cadets the next set of topics are much more practical and a little less daunting. We shall see!

Now for a little bit of what the exams entail for those of you that are interested. All of the exams are multiple choice with some exams as few as 24 questions in half an hour to some with as many as 80 in two hours. The timing for the exams is perfectly reasonable as after much practice on the question bank, we soon find ourselves getting through questions rather quickly. The CAA like to catch us out and you can soon find yourself making stupid mistakes, and with a pass mark of 75% there isn't much margin for error! The exams this week havn't been too bad. There were a couple of tricky questions here and there but for the most part, with effective preparation, there wasn't anything too troubling. I now want to forget those for the time being and focus on relaxing. Results should arrive in a couple of weeks and there isn't anything I can do about them now. It, however, is a strange feeling now having to deal with life without four possible options. Give any of us four possible answers and I'm sure we could pick out the correct one. For now though, I'm going to unwind properly and enjoy the time off.

As ever questions about the training, selection, CTC etc are more than welcome. I know a few of you are probably wanting to ask a few things prior to the British Airways FPP opening on Monday. I know I'm on the easyJet MPL but the skills required during selection are fairly common across airlines and the ground-school training is the same.

The Great British weather

Disclaimer: Not representative of normal British Weather!

The weather is a peculiar thing that us Brits never seem to be happy with. We love to complain about it but in reality there is absolutely nothing we can do. We can however learn how this planet throws up such contrasting conditions and use this knowledge to try and provide the passengers the smoothest and safest ride possible.

Meteorology, arguably the most important of the topics covered, is a monster, with the longest exam and six days to get through a list of learning objectives the length of an Airbus. It, like the other topics, is actually fascinating, but without a geography degree this very full on crash course in Met seems pretty complicated. Topics covered include altimetry, cloud spotting, humidity and wind among other things and once you sit down and get to grips with the content I find it surprisingly straight forward. That said there is still a lot of it and by no means to be underestimated.

Admittedly I have acquired some knowledge of meteorology from the amount of gliding I have done, which makes things a little easier. It also means that I have seen a few of the plethora of charts that can be used for deciphering the weather conditions at particular times. It's great now being able to understand these (and more), be able read them properly and do a little amateur weather forecasting in my spare time! The weather conditions are a very important part of gliding, and aviation in general, so having a good understanding not only makes you a better and safer pilot, but can make for some very enjoyable experiences. More on that another time! I am often asked about the best conditions for flying gliders. Well the picture above is just that! Lots of fluffy cumulus cloud and lots of blue sky for the sun to shine through. Just beautiful!

As the nights draw in and the day gets noticeably and depressingly shorter, the reality that our exams are only a month away is starting to hit home. I have definitely started to feel the pressure, even being on top of it all. Slowly but surely everything seems to be falling into place which is helping to carry that motivation through the long hours of study. Don't let that put you off though, as if you have a passion for aviation you will find ground school really interesting and actually rather enjoyable. Enough from me today, so Au Revoir!

Ps. Quite a few people asked me how they can follow the blog, so there is now a facebook page www.facebook.com/cwbpilot where you can follow the blog and where I will put additional interesting stuff. So please go and "like" the page to keep updated!

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!

Ground School

Apologies for the lengthy and boring nature of this post, but I was asked a question about what I actually have to learn during Pilot Training. I'm now three weeks in and havn't actually revealed what Pilot training entails, so I thought that I would give you a run down of the course here at CTC. 

There are 14 ATPL (Airline Transport Pilots License) theory exams, the material for which is taught during the ground school phase over the first five months. The material is delivered via the classroom and the previously mentioned CBT (computer based training).  The topics are:

• Aircraft General Knowledge
• Principles of Flight
• Instruments
• Air Law
• Meteorology
• IFR communication
• VFR communications
• Mass and Balance
• Flight Planning
• General Navigation
• Flight Performance
• Operational Procedures
• Radio Navigation
• Human Performance 

Yesterday we started the Instruments topic, but only after we had all filled in our exam registration forms.  It's quite scary thinking that in six weeks we will have completed half of the ground school.  It's also amazing to think that in that time we will have consumed all of this knowledge.

Time for some more advice, when it comes to academia, always try and do things that you enjoy.  It will make a massive difference to the outcome of your learning.  I spent three years at University and really didn't enjoy my course, and as such I achieved a relatively poor grade at the end.  Now I'm here studying for what I have wanted to do for such a long time, I find it so much more enjoyable and as such I find it significantly easier to study long hours and learn all of the material.  That said, ask me again around exam time and I will probably tell you otherwise.