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!

Weeks 10 + 11: Performance

Another two weeks of ground school have come and gone, as has another lengthy subject; Performance. It's mainly related to, funnily enough, the performance of an aircraft at the various stages of flight and the external conditions that can have significant effects on the aircraft in question.

So for example, we are required to work out (with the seemingly endless supply of graphs), the distance required for the aircraft to take off depending on the weight, altitude, temperature, wind, slope etc, and the speeds at which it will lift off the runway and safely climb away at a given rate of climb and thrust setting. I think a lot of people assume planes apply full power, hurtle down the runway and take off the same way every time, but there's a lot of factors that I've just mentioned which can make a huge difference. Having a runway contaminated with water can cause its takeoff and landing distance to increase because of the lack of friction, so making sure the aircraft has enough runway is very important!

There's also a decent chunk of theory involved, some of which we originally covered in Principles of Flight, which fortunately makes the learning curve a little less steep!

Although Performance is of course relevant, I'd be lying if I said it was my favourite subject! There's a lot of speeds and numbers to learn off by heart, and it's not as interesting as some of the other subjects I've done. Oh well, I'd best get on with it!

I also had a good time volunteering at the CTC Open Day the Saturday before last. It was good to give aspiring pilots some advice and just have a general chat, as this time last year I was in the same position! I also managed to get some time in the simulator, which is always a bonus!

Week 9: Instruments

A week of lessons is over, and so is another topic; Instruments, which is split into two parts. Basic Instruments is associated with mostly mechanical instruments and how they operate in relation to pressure and temperature. So for example, an airspeed indicator is fed with both total pressure as well as static pressure (pressure of the ambient air) and therefore the differential pressure between them is used to determine speed. It's a clever, yet simple piece of kit..

Moving on from this (and the concept of gyroscopes, thank goodness!), we finished off the topic with Advanced Instruments from Thursday until Saturday, which was taught to us by two Airbus A320 pilots. This is more to do with the technical, computer sides of things and deals with components of modern aircraft such as the Autopilot System and Flight Management Computer (FMC). The FMC contains all the navigation and performance data which pilots need to navigate a flight a plan effectively whilst also determining the optimum speeds and altitude at which to fly. Despite having a very important and complex job, it's actually quite weak in terms of power compared with today's computers funnily enough! We also covered the automated, safety sides of things like the TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) which in a nutshell, alerts the pilots if you're flying a little bit close to another aircraft! 

The Control Display Unit (CDU), used to access the Flight Management Computer (FMC)

Advanced Instruments has definitely been the most interesting part of Ground School for me so far, and it's all relevant stuff which we'll be using on a daily basis in our careers. Although right now it's just a lot to take in and remember! We also had a brief simulator session on Saturday morning in the 737-700 to have a go at programming the systems and seeing how they actually work in reality. It was great fun, and certainly gave me a motivation boost (not that I needed one!). 

Credits go to my course mate Eren for the photos..  https://instagram.com/eren12/

Mocks and Module One Exams

First of all, sorry for the lack of activity on here recently. Unfortunately during the period of revision for exams frankly there isn't much to talk about, apart from how little time I've spent away from my desk! Nevertheless, I thought I'd give a quick update on what's been going on in the last couple of weeks.

Following on from my last module one lessons, we had about a week or so to revise (and most importantly remember!) everything before sitting our first set of mock exams. CTC Aviation require that we sit these mock exams before the real thing, which is a good idea because it's shows the progress that you're making and also highlights any weak areas which you then have time to work on before you sit the real exam.

Thankfully I passed all the mocks and then what followed was the SLOWEST 2 weeks of my life; getting ready for the real CAA exams. The days felt longer and my wall of notes just kept growing..

Before I arrived, I'd set myself a target of 90% average as a minimum for my exams, and I'm happy to say that I got a 94% average across my module 1 exams, meaning that the hard work and late nights have paid off! I'm now looking forward to a weekend off at home for the first time, before module 2 starts on Monday! It's also exciting to think that we are a third of the way through ground school, so flight training in Phoenix is slowing starting to creep up on us!

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!

Week 4: Continuing with GNav and HPL

Well this week we have continued to plough through more of General Navigation and Human Performance + Limitations, as we reach the halfway point of module 1! CP136 arrived for their meet and greet on Thursday and start ground school tomorrow, meaning we are no longer the babies of CTC!

We've done a further 3 days of General Navigation this week, focusing mainly on various types of charts such as the Mercator, Lambert's conformal and the dreaded POLAR STEREOGRAPHIC charts. These are all types of charts used on a day to day basis in aviation, and as such, we are required to understand not only their properties, but also calculate things such as the distance and direction between points on the graphs (very simplified explanation..) and calculate the changes in scale across the chart, building on the basics of convergency and departure that we learnt last week. I've personally found this rather difficult as I'm not a natural mathematician and some of the questions require a decent amount of maths to come to the answer. However, General Navigation is a very hands-on topic, so I'm hoping that practice and perfecting the technique is the key to success!

This more or less sums up Polar Stereographic Charts for me!

To finish off the week on Friday we had another day of HPL, which is in essence, "100 ways to lose your class 1 medical"! The causes of diabetes, hypoxia, stress, errors, the effects of alcohol on the body, the properties of the eye, nervous system, vestibular system and cardiovascular system are all things we have been learning about this week (to name a few!..). I'll be honest, these aren't the most interesting topics to learn about, but our instructor seems to have a story for almost every single one so that has definitely made it more enjoyable!

We have just over a week of lessons left from tomorrow onwards, and then following this is a couple of weeks of revision, so the first exams are getting closer by the day!

Week 3: Introduction to GNav and HPL

Week 3 has now come to a close, and it still feels like we only been here a week!

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, this week has seen us make a start on our second mammoth-sized subject of module 1; General Navigation. We've had 3 days of GNav ground school so far this week covering numerous topic areas, most of which involving our other new friend; the CRP-5! This clever piece of kit allows me to do a multitude of things, such as calculate wind speed and direction, and convert between different units of measurement and speed. Following this was an introduction to latitude and longitude, and how we can find the distance between locations on the earth using a number of different formulae; (Convergency= Change in Longitude (Degrees) x sine mean latitude) being my favourite..

The magic calculator, A.K.A Pooleys CRP-5 Flight Computer

On Thursday morning we made a start on our 4th and final topic of Module 1; Human Performance and Limitations. Although there have been vast safety improvements in commercial aviation over the years, pilot error is still to blame for over 70% of accidents, so learning our physical and mental limitations is key to understanding how accidents involving human factors can be avoided in the future. On Friday afternoon, we were fortunate enough to be given a presentation on spatial disorientation by Dr Rollin Stott. A rather fun way of showing spatial disorientation in action was getting us to wear a pair of glasses that reverse your horizontal vision, making it seem like you've had a few too many pints down the pub!

It's crazy to think that we've been here nearly a month already, as we will soon no longer be the babies of CTC! CP136 have their APD next week, so if I'm around I'll try and say hi when they arrive on Friday. Although the workload is still very high, relieving stress is key to staying on track throughout the 6 months I'm here, so I did manage to have a rare night out on Saturday and subsequent BBQ with some of the guys at our house on Sunday evening as well, before it all starts again on Monday morning.