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| Airline Prep |
That's it, ground school is officially finished. That was most definitely the hardest 6 months of my life. I have never worked so hard but I'm very glad I did because it totally paid off. After the mocks we had a large amount of time to revise (a full two weeks), which was sufficient to get up to speed with all the topics. I must have done about 8 hours every day during that period so I felt prepared when it came to the exams. The second week seemed to drag a lot as I felt ready and was just spending the whole day answering the same questions over and over again.
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| revision at 6am on thursday morning. beautiful view from my bedroom. |
We were the second course to take the new electronic exams which I was initially skeptical about because we all receive different papers. To me that seems completely unfair but there's no other option but to just get on with it and hope the dealer is kind to you.
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| the setting. lush! |
It's taken in a room that looks just like the driving theory room with a sufficient amount of space for the charts, with the boards up either side separating you from the next person and a computer of course. You all go in together and log into the system with the username and code given to you on a sheet of paper on the desk, whilst you listen to the brief by the invigilator (which gets a little repetitive when you've heard it twice a day for the past week). You're then told to start, you click start and off you go. There is a count-down clock in the top right corner and there are separated sections, usually A,B,C,D. You have a bar across the top of the screen with the question numbers and when you answer a question it turns green to mark that it's been answered. If you choose to skip a question it stays black to remind you that it hasn't been answered or you can answer it and mark it, in which case it turns red so you can go back to it at the end. You can click on any question at any time, it's not like the question bank where you can only click next and that's it so to be honest I was pretty impressed with the layout of it. You also have to click finish twice so there's no chance of accidentally closing the test prematurely. As I said, my only complaint is that everyone has different questions.
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I felt good coming out of all the exams with exception of performance. I had a lot of CAP questions on graphs I hadn't seen before and they were worth a lot of marks. It's very hard to tell with those questions whether you've done it correctly or not and it's worth a large percentage of the exam. On top of that I had a few too many tricky theory questions which I wasn't sure about so I was very worried about that one. This highlighted my concern with the system as some people only had 3 CAP questions plus some easier theory questions, whereas I had about 6 or 7 which makes a massive difference! All the other exams were mainly question bank questions with a few new ones thrown in but they didn't seem unreasonable so I think I was lucky to receive a decent set of exams, plus of course I had worked extremely hard to get to that position in the first place.
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| relaxing in the sun #heaven |
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| epic game of pool which was definitely a close match...... |
Finishing ops on Thursday morning was an amazing feeling and we all congregated to my housemates house (which is very nice indeed) to enjoy each others company in the perfect sunny weather and in a really chilled out environment before heading out into Winchester for a night out. It was absolutely perfect! and fair to say a fair few drinks were had by all. Well earned I say!
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| some of the crew |
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| myself and Gareth |
We received our results the very next morning which is absolutely brilliant, no hanging around. It was a very tense time indeed! We were expecting them to come through at about 7am but instead they started coming through at 10:10, slowly, one by one. The last one came through at 11:30. It was absolute hell!
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| some of the lads in Winchester |
I am very pleased to announce though that I SUCCESSFULLY PASSED ALL of the exams, as did many of the course including both my housemates so as you can imagine we were very very happy and it eased the damage of the previous night a bit.
My schedule and results were as follows:
Monday: 9am - GNAV - 97%
4pm - PERFORMANCE - 88%
Tuesday: 9am - RNAV - 91%
4pm - MASS & BALANCE - 94%
Wednesday: 9am - FLIGHT PLANNING - 94%
4pm - HUMAN PERFORMANCE - 96%
Thursday: 9am - OPS - 89%
Overall average - 91% with 14 first time passes. YES!!
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| luke the next day. hangovers are hard for old people |
I just have an APD on Monday along with an exit interview with the head of ground school then we all leave for New Zealand on July 30th. Finally! Let the celebrations begin.
