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| Airline Prep |
It's been fairly slow progress for me over the last couple of weeks, now three weeks into the IR I've done just five sims. I've finished the UK orientation phase and the one lesson we have looking at the autopilot on the DA42.
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| The Centre |
The orientation sims are just practising the techniques we've been taught in New Zealand such as instrument departures, tracking, holding and various approaches as well as learning the UK procedures, radio phraseology and kicking out bad habits that have crept in.
The standards expected of you here are so high. We're expected to fly extremely accurately and our checks need to be second nature now. I think I'm more or less used to the UK radio phraseology now which free's up a bit of capacity.
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| Top pilot organisation ..... |
My second sim was embarrassingly bad! I'd travelled from home on the day, back seated one of my flying partners before me and then flown. I was also fighting the cold that was going round the course so things weren't in my favour. I was only doing hold entries and holding which shouldn't have been an issue but I just couldn't seem to think clearly and lost my situational awareness and once you get behind the aircraft in IFR it's very hard to get back ahead of it. I've definitely learnt a lesson from that and will always make sure I am back in the area before a flight in the future. However, my next two were a hundred times better and proved to myself and the instructor that I am competent and have a reasonable idea of what I'm doing so things are back on track now thankfully.
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| Explaining a bit about the DA42 to some visitors |
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| Start up checks |
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| Taxiing in the sim |
The next stage is the 'LOFT' phase, which is four flights treated like actual commercial flights. I will tell you more about it when I've done it. A few people on my course have finished those flights already and my flying partner and I haven't even started yet! I think they're deliberately staggering us so that there isn't a big pile up for the exam at the end. Most of us have been in groups of three so far but this week a few more instructors have freed up so we are now in pairs which means things should start moving a bit quicker.
The schedule here doesn't come out until about six pm the day before which makes it difficult to make plans. The consensus is that we have to be available 24/7.
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| The house |
I've been doing quite a bit of back seating which really helps for this stage. Because you're concentrating so hard when you're flying it's very easy to miss something or not quite register what's happened but seeing it at least once from an observers perspective is so helpful and makes things much clearer I think.
A standard sim landing. Would also like to express I am filming, not flying.
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