Week 5: The Earth's Orbit, Charts and The Cockpit Environment

Finishing off HPL and GNav has been the main focus of this week's lessons, as it's now less than 7 days until our first set of mock exams!

We've covered quite a few different areas of GNav this week, starting with the solar system, and how the Earth's orbit of the sun influences the seasons and the amount of daylight and night-time that  different areas of the world receive. The main reason for this is the 23.5° axial tilt of the Earth,  meaning that as the earth orbits the sun throughout the year, the area of the earth that the sun is directly overhead changes by up to 23.5° north or south of the equator (at the tropics). Converting between time zones is also something we've learnt, allowing us to accurately determine for example, the local time in a westerly location compared to an easterly location depending on their distance from Greenwich (GMT). 

This probably explains it better than I have!

The most interesting topic by far this week has been an introduction to radio plotting on charts, which is important for plotting an accurate, real-time position of the aircraft in relation to navigation aids such as VORs and DMEs. As you can probably guess, it's a hands-on topic, which took a little while to understand but became a lot easier after a bit of practice. We've only briefly covered charts, but will come back to them in Flight Planning in much more detail later on in ground school. All that's left now of GNav is a bit on fuel calculations which we'll do on Monday.

Later on in the week we got to the end of the HPL syllabus (phew!), with the majority of information being in relation to the cockpit environment. A lot of emphasis in the aviation world is put on having a "synergistic cockpit"; one with effective leadership, teamwork and cooperation of the flight crew. This allows a positive, professional and most importantly SAFE cockpit atmosphere to be maintained. It makes sense being taught about it now, as it's going to be repeated to us again and again during our future careers!

Finally, I capped off the working week with a trip to Bournemouth Airshow on Friday night with a few of my course mates. I've been to a lot of airshows before, but never in the evening, which makes it even more impressive to watch when there's neon lights and fireworks involved!