How Time Flies By...

I have made a fair bit of progress since my last update. I am now more than half way through my flying stage of the course and I only have 6 more flights until my first competency test. The competency test will see off my foundation visual flying stage and mark the start of my instrument flying where I will be flying under a hood/in cloud relying just on instruments to navigate.

The past 2 weeks have been a mixture of solo and dual navigation flights to various locations around the North Island. I was lucky enough to fly North to Waiheke island and then through the controlled airspace past the famous Skytower in Auckland. The pictures from the journey there do not do it enough justice! Flying at 1,500ft above the city and then over Auckland International airport was just amazing. These flights are basically refining our visual navigation skills with arrival and departure of controlled aerodrome procedures which at times can get tricky. I am definitely more confident making radio calls now and there are no aerodromes that I get nervous of joining now.

Yesterdays flight was a good flight. I did a route which took me to Tauranga, Whakatane, Rotorua and back to Hamilton. I did touch and go's (touch the wheels on the runway and then take off again) at Tauranga and Rotorua. Tauranga is a pretty tricky aerodrome to get to because it is controlled and you have specified procedures for arrival and again for departure. The trick to a good arrival and departure is to make sure you brief yourself and fully understand what you are about to do. The extra challenge was that the wind was gusting 30Kts which it quite a lot in a small plane. The landing was perfect and I departed as planned. I then flew overhead Whakatane to intercept my next track to Rotorua. Rotorua is a big challenge too. The aerodrome is surrounded by mountains which adds the turbulent aspect. It is also a controlled aerodrome but does not have a specified arrival and departure procedure so they can ask you to arrive at different visual reporting points...some of which are hard to pronounce, I'm sure they have a laugh at us trying to pronounce some of the names. The trick to Rotorua is to be familiar with the surrounding visual reference points before you get there. The landing at Rotorua was going to be a challenge as when I was on the final approach the wind was directly across the runway at 20kts which is very high in a light aircraft. I have always loved the challenge of a crosswind landing and it went perfectly. I landed without flaps to make it easier as with flaps down, it makes it easier for the wind to push you off the centreline. Then it was back to Hamilton to finish with another crosswind landing which was well executed again. Lets hope I keep landing like that for my tests!

Travelling wise, I have only done 2 trips and that was climbing a mountain called Maungatautari. There is a track that goes from the North nature reserve to the South nature reserve but with 2 summits. It takes 5hours to go the whole length so we only did the a peak each time. On the first walk 3 of us went up the North side to be disappointed with the view at the summit. It was covered with trees! So I decided that I'd climb the summit tower and get a view from the top which was a bit better. The South track which was another challenging walk but it was rewarding with great views from the top.

Time here is going too fast, my departure date is zooming upon us and I wish I could stay here longer! It's definitely a place I will be visiting on a regular basis as I have barely seen any of the best bits and doubt I will get to see the best bits on this visit.

Until next time, you know the drill.......

From the top of the summit tower.

Pan of the views from the N summit Maungatautari (979m)

The night sky is quite spectacular, after playing with camera settings I have finally managed to picture it.

Waiheke, probably one of the most beautiful places to fly over in NZ

Waiheke again.

Harbour bridge

Almost level with the Skytower

Mt Eden crater

One Tree Hill

Flying over the international terminal

Rotorua

Pan of from the Peak on the S track at Maungatautari

Mokau on the way back from New Plymouth

A lake next to Rotorua.

Module 1 over!

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.