Weeks 11 + 12: Flight Planning

With just over 3 days of lessons left to go in Module 2, exams are again looming... Thankfully we have a decent number of study days between now and then, so there's still ample time to continue working away at our 4 subjects.

Following Performance a couple of weeks ago, we made a start on Flight Planning. You may remember whilst I was studying General Navigation that I mentioned we had been briefly introduced to charts and given a basic understanding of how to use them. Flight Planning has taken this one rather large step further and taught us how to utilise navigation aids such as VORs and DMEs in conjunction with airways to plan a route from A to B. This is all well and good flying across the sky at 35,000ft, but you also need to take off and land at airports safely; this is where SIDS (Standard Instrument Departures) and STARS (Standard Terminal Arrival Routes) come into play. These are essentially pre-planned paths that guide aeroplanes in and out of airports in a safe fashion though the use of waypoints, rather than having a free-for-all to land and take off! Here's an example of a Standard Instrument Departure at London Heathrow; think of it as a slip road that you'd use to join the motorway!

The other side of Flight Planning focuses on the important cost in commercial aviation, and that is of course fuel. Airlines don't like their aircraft to carry more fuel than they need, as it's obviously very expensive and carrying more means burning extra fuel to lift the heavier aircraft into the sky. Therefore, we were taught using a multitude of graphs and tables how to determine the amount of fuel different aircraft would need for a specific operation dependant on the sector distance, and the amount of fuel per hour the aircraft would burn, including reserves for emergencies, adverse weather etc. Riveting stuff I know, but burning unnecessary amounts of fuel is inefficient and drives up costs, so airlines like to keep it to a minimum. We finished off the week with an exercise in which we planned a flight from London Stansted to Biarritz, filling in a flight plan, plotting the route on the chart and working out the fuel we would need, which was quite an enjoyable end to the topic.

After quite a busy few days of ground school this week, we celebrated the birthday of one of my course mates Rumanul, with a Chinese on Friday night. This is one the few meals out we've actually been able to have as a group, so it's good to have an evening off every once in a while from work and relax!