CPL Diary
After reading Flying for funs report on his CPL course I decided to do the same. I enjoyed reading his account and thought it would be nice to do another a few months on. The same rules apply, if anyone wants me to continue with this diary I will, but if you are all bored to tears with this subject I won’t.
Here is my experience of doing a CPL at EFT in Florida. For background I am fairly low houred, having 180 in total with 100 P1. I have a night rating and have completed the 14 ATPL exams. I have completed my 300NM flight, and my experience is all single engine PA28 etc although I do have around 40 hrs complex.
I flew BA into Miami, and as promised there was someone waiting to pick me up. I was taken to my accommodation (arranged by EFT) which was on a trailer park 1 mile from the airport. The accommodation I must say is fairly good, with a restaurant and shop and pool on site. Any way here goes.
Day 1
Unfortunately I am still on UK time and so got up at 3am. Had to be at the School for enrolment at 10am, so I had a fairly long wait. On arrival I was surprised at how busy it is here. I was given a quick tour around and then basically spent the day sitting around in the sun watching people come and go. By the afternoon tiredness had set in and I desperately needed some sleep. However I was promised a back seat ride to familiarise myself with the area. This was well worth waiting for as you can learn a lot from watching others. I noticed that their RT is very slack compared to the UK, almost like a chat with one of your mates. The instruction seemed to be really good and a new one on me was the take off brief which I had never heard before. After rotation we climbed to 2500 and turned to the south. The plan was for the student to fly to a set point, and then be given a diversion. All the time the instructor was on about seeing the big picture, i.e. Ocean to the left, lake to the right (gross error check). The student was not allowed to make any heading corrections until his half way point, where he then had to give the instructor his new heading and just fly it. The diversion was given at about 3 minutes from destination, so as to leave time for planning. I liked the way that the instructor was very basic in his approach. He said get your ruler out, lay it on the chart, and now look up and scan outside, instrument scan, now look down and mark a line, now lookout again,scan instruments, look down again and find your heading etc,etc. The diversion worked out fairly well and we did a glide approach back into Fort Pierce just for good measure. Tomorrow I have my first flight booked for 1200 so look forward to that.