It's been a while since my last post, mainly because these posts take a long time to create and it was time that I didn't have spare.
A typical day for me would consist of the following schedule:
0700: wake up, get ready, have breakfast.
0815: leave house to go to training centre
0900-12ish: lectures with at least 1 break of 15mins (depending on whos teaching)
12ish-1ish: have lunch.
1ish-4ish rest of lessons with another break or 2.
5ish-11pm revise and have dinner then sleep.
Since my last post we completed the last 2 subjects of Mod 1, Principles of Flight (POF) and Human Performance and Limitations (HPL). POF was taught over 6 days and there was so much content covered. Thankfully a lot of the content covered I had already learnt in my degree so I was basically just refreshing it. That said, I still found it difficult and confusing at times because there are so many relationships to remember, e.g. increasing the aspect ratio of a wing does what to lift coefficient and the induced drag... I won't bore you with all the content because most of you who will be reading this won't have a clue what I am talking about.
HPL was taught over 6 days too. This subject was interesting and there wasn't so much content to cover so it was easier to learn. This subject involved learning about things like the effects of hypoxia which can happen to pilots when flying above 10,000ft in an unpressurised cabin. Another example, if you are flying at 40,000ft and you suffer a decompression, you have approx 12 seconds of useful conciousness. This not because of the lack of oxygen (because oxygen content (21%)is constant up to a certain height) but because the partial pressure of oxygen is lower. At 34,000ft the partial pressure is approx 1/4 than that of sea level. There were quite a few Air Crash Investigation videos which help us to learn from the mistakes made in the past. I could go on but I have probably already lost your attention. Some funny questions from the bank are shown below which are from past exam questions. Also for this subject we got the chance to experience disorientation through the use of reversal goggles. They use prisms to make your left hand appear on the right. My course mate Dom gave us all a good demonstration in the video below.
There was a CTC open day on 28th Feb which I volunteered to help out at. This gave me a chance to speak to people who were in my position a few years ago and give them advice. The main reason I wanted to do the day was to get some time in the simulators to keep my motivation up because you get so stressed about exams that you loose focus as to why you are really there. I managed to get in the big A320 sim while all the guests were having a presentation and while it was only an approach and landing, it was still a motivation booster. When the event was over at the end of the day, we managed to get on the Boeing 737 fixed base simulator and have a bit of fun. We did all sorts of scenarios which included doing an automatic landing in complete white out fog. It was that thick that I could only just about see the runway lights after we had landed, it was quite scary to think that the plane landed itself where a pilot would have had to divert to somewhere else because you literally could not see 60ft in front of you. When you think you are approaching at about 15,000ft/min you do kind of need to see further than 60ft. We also tried high cross wind and instrument approaches. The best scenario we had was to try and do a fast circuit. The clock starts when you release the brakes and stops when the wheels touch down (when they finally touch down for those who had a few bounces on landing) The video below shows 2 of my course mates attempting to do a quick circuit but failing to do it in a quick time and buzzing the tower in the process. It was a great end to the day along with pizza and a beer to say thanks to us for helping.
One last bit (sorry its a long post), I had my exams Monday and Tuesday this week which I can thankfully say that I passed with an overall average of 87%. 4 exams down....10 to go.
If you put your email address in the box on the right it should send you an email when I update this (I haven't tested but it should).
Click on the pictures to make them bigger.
