WEEK 21: MOD 2 MOCKS #20

Airline Prep

This week turned out to be a very successful one for me. Having had four days off to prepare we started our mocks with GNAV and RNAV. I thought the layout for these mocks was much better than last time. Rather than cramming them all into three days in a row they were more spread out which gave us more time to revise.

A few of the papers were very difficult and left a lot of us feeling uncertain about whether we'd passed or not, GNAV and PERF in particular. GNAV seemed to have quite a few questions that weren't in the database and that required us to think right back to when we were taught the topic. I hope this was an exam made deliberately more difficult than the real thing.

The flask the class got for our favorite instructor

The exam layout was as such:

WEDNESDAY: GNAV & RNAV
FRIDAY: PERF, MASS&BALANCE, HUMAN PERFORMANCE
MONDAY: FLIGHT PLANNING, OPS

My results were as follows:

GNAV - 81%
RNAV - 78%
PERF - 83%
MASS&BALANCE - 94%
HUMAN PERFORMANCE  - 88%
FLIGHT PLANNING - 88%
OPS - 87%

AVERAGE 85%

A view of the building work going on in the main hall. There's something not quite right...

My goal was to pass five out of the seven so I didn't have to retake but to my surprise I achieved the goal I set myself for the real exams. Needless to say I was very happy. I just need to repeat the process in a couple of weeks time.

My visa for New Zealand. Very exciting!

WEEK 19 & 20: HUMAN PERFORMANCE & OPERATIONS #19

So that's it, fourteen subjects covered and none to go, the whole ATPL syllabus has been completed.

Airline Prep

After a long weekend Human Performance (HPL) was the topic to be studied. Having done Psychology A-level I was looking forward to HPL as a lot of the areas are the same or similar to what I did last year at school. It didn't fail to disappoint, it has become my new favorite subject and was definitely the most enjoyable.

It is a relatively laid back course and the concepts are fairly straight forward to understand. We seemed to watch one or two air crash investigations a day which was brilliant. The subject seemed to be so relevant as well which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. The scenarios we talked about are real life scenarios that we need to be aware of and know how to prevent or deal with (for example, decompression, hypoxia, hyperventilation as well as a few biological things like parts of the ear and eye and how they work).

I learned quite a lot and will definitely take that forward with me into the future to prevent potential accidents or incidents occurring.

On the last day of HPL we did a couple of practice exams (in which I got 91 & 89% so happy days), watched an aircrash investigation and then a doctor came in to give a lecture on his experience of dealing with disorientated pilots. He was very good and again it was great hearing about real life scenarios. It's scary how easy it is to become disorientated without visual references!

We then got to experience it ourselves by trying to walk in a straight line whilst wearing these funny goggles which made walking seem like the most challenging task on Earth!

Over all, a very enjoyable subject!

The last three days were spent on Operational Procedures (OPS) which was fairly similar to air law. There's a lot of tables and figures to memorize which is no fun at all. There are also a lot of rules to be aware of such as what to do in the event of a fire, decompression, ditching, micro-bursts, icing etc.

To be honest it's all a bit boring and I think the more time spent on the bank for it, the better.

It's a great feeling not having to go in for lessons now and it's all just revision now for the next 23 days. The mocks start on Wednesday and the real exams start on July 7th. Let the grafting begin!