End of an era...

...beginning of a new one.

My former life is now well and truly concluded and I am completely immersed in the new. Uniforms were all waiting for us on the first day with our flight bags. Here is mine:

Bus driver or security guard?

(The room is a little tidier than that now. A little.)

When they tell you how much work you have to do, they're not kidding. Crucially it's about consolidating the day's material and preparing the stuff for the day after.

So far a typical day is:

8.20 leave for CTC Nursling
8.45 arrive and have a quick coffee
9.00 Groundschool session (lecture/class depending on how you like to look at it)
10.00 Break
10.15 Second session
11.30 Time to consolidate morning information and get ready for the afternoon using CBT
12.30 Lunch
13.30 Back in for afternoon sessions along the same format as the morning

We finish around 16.30 and then head back home. So far I've been having a quick rest and then getting on with looking over everything we've done during the day to make sure it's all understood (it usually isn't) and then working to fix any problems. This can be through a bit of internet research, chats with housemates, using the CBT or working through the question bank on the given topic. ATPL question bank is a massive resource of questions on everything, all posed in the same manner as the CAA questions that will form the final exams. I'm sure this format will be different for each subject, depending on material and the instructor but it gives a basic idea.

This week's topic is Aircraft General Knowledge - most of this is based on the airframe and the systems that make up a large jet transport. We are moving on to Pressurisation and Fuel systems tomorrow, having covered Hydraulics etc. so far.

It's a lot to take in but it's well delivered, well supported and manageable if you put in the hours.

Here's a few pics to clarify things:

I enjoyed the description of this as a 'simplified' layout. Sure it will be one day.

Here is an example of the question bank

So that's all for now really. The next 5 months are all about this (though there are 13.5 more subjects still to cover!) and then it will be all the pretty pictures flying around NZ.

Getting closer

This week has had a few milestones in it. There have been two exciting things. The first was finding out about the accommodation - this is in a rented cottage on the edge of the New Forest.

The other exciting thing was access to all of the ATPL course material that we will be using on the iPad. It's about 5GB and took a few hours to download. Here is a selection of screenshots:

Showing 9 of the 18 'books' downloaded

Equation type stuff - lots of this

And exciting looking pictures

Next significant step is to move there finally in around two weeks, after which I think the posts will be a little more interesting.