Day 5
Scheduled to fly at 1200 so arrived at 11ish and carried out mass and balance and performance calculations and pre-flighted the aircraft. It was decided that we would carry out the Instrument section first today. We briefed for that and got airborne. At about 500ft the suction gauge read zero, and everything stopped working. You can’t really continue instruments without any suction, so we had to return straight away and bin the flight. This was a little disappointing as this will now put me half a day behind schedule. This was sweetened a little by the fact that my instructor said I could log 30 minutes for the flight but I wouldn’t be charged for it. We got another aircraft and briefed the next lesson which was to be my introduction into their way of navigation. This consists of splitting each leg into either 1/2 , 1/3 or 1/4 waypoints. Each waypoint must be at least six minutes from the next one. Drift lines are then added at 10 deg, and you fly from point to point making no corrections at all until you reach the time. You then assess your drift, make corrections, advise your next heading and ETA and fly on. Our route was going to take us through a Military area which at the last minute turned out to be active. We decided to save the Nav for tomorrow and continue with the previous lessons instruments. We departed to the south and I was immediately put under the hood. We flew for about an hour on full panel at various speeds and profiles. The main lesson today was that in commercial flying, if I ask you to do anything, e.g. climb, descend there is always something that you must do first, before initiating the manoeuvre. Every time I forgot to check the mixture was rich and the Ts&Ps were good before climbing, the instructor drew a mark on my wrist. He says this is a good way of drumming it in because he uses one of those permanent markers, apparently when I try and wash it off tonight I will remember. On the whole the flight went well and he seems to think that I don’t have any problems controlling the aircraft, but I need to pay more attention to the checks and RT. The RT comment is a bit hard to swallow, as in the UK I must say my RT is good. Over here they are so slack that half the time the reason you miss a call is because you can’t understand what they are saying. Any way I will try harder.
<<edit: There should be NO NEED to change your "good" UK R/T. Give us some examples of the comments you are getting about supposedly bad R/T.
99% of what you say in the UK will work in USA airspace - but NOT the other way round - so you should not be being taught to change.>>
Last edited by Keygrip; 30th May 2005 at 02:43.