How to use your hour building efficiently...

[Capt T]

Evening chaps,

Just had my license through today, so time to crack on with the hour building phase.

From some of you veteran ppruner's, I was hoping to tap into your wisdom and hoping for some advice with the hour building.

I would like to keep the hour building relevant and help me with the future training (CPL etc). Could I get some pointers from pilots who have already completed these phases and tell me how they did it, how they would do it differently etc.

Thanks a lot!

[LastStandards]

Yes - make your flying simple! If planning to go somewhere, plan the longest straight lines you can manage and use range/bearing from significant features to confirm position rather than feature crawling for track maintenance. As in the PPL, get used to setting a good rough heading, confirming with a gross error check, and then putting the chart down until you have 2 minutes to run to a planned enroute fix where you can refine the heading/time. This has worked for all my CPL students so far...

Other exercises: try spending a trip or 2 just flying straight and level while varying speed in 5kt increments, maintaining exactly S&L while accelerating or decelerating. The same exercise while extending/retracting flap to selected stages. Define S&L as altimeter and HI stationary rather than within some tolerances - all while maintaining a good visual lookout.

All hard work, but will pay dividends in understanding of pure flying later on, and will make the CPL course that little bit more straightforward and productive.

[Martin_123]

don't leave your 300nm trip till very late. Some people leave it till the end of hour building or want to do something "special" with it, as in a trip abroad or something.. all well and nice, except many get stuck for wx. So don't get fancy, get the requirement done. Afterwards, by all means go places, but at that point you won't worry about your miles anymore so it takes the pressure off.

[Council Van]

But do not forget to enjoy having a PPL, enjoy the view out of the window.

[rudestuff]

My favourite question! What you can do now kind of depends on what total and pic time you have.
Try to anticipate what you might be short of one day. Probably night and instrument. I would definitely recommend getting your FAA IR - it'll bring your EASA IR training minimums down to 15 hours.
Get your 300 miler done. An hour in the circuit is fun, but an hour under the hood at night going cross country ticks a lot more boxes. You never know where this industry will take you (I went from an R22 to a 757) - you might find you need an FAA certificate one day. Guess what? you'll have to do your 300 miler again if it didn't have a 250nm leg. I'd love to go to Florida on holiday and rent a float plane, but you can't unless you have 25 hours on floats. I could have got 25 hours on floats during my hour building for just the difference in price. Now It'll cost me another 25 hours.
If you hour build in the UK (some people do!) Try to find out popular CPL navigation routes​, and make sure you know the area like the back of your hand!