It's been quite a long time since my last post as not a huge amount has happened that's worth reporting. However, things have perked up a bit in the last two days.
Yesterday I had my 'famil flight' with BA where you get to sit on the flight deck and experience a couple of sectors from the perspective of the pilots. It's a real eye-opener as, while being inspirational in so many ways, it's also quite daunting realising how far one has to go to get up to the level of these professional pilots.
Some of the highlights included doing the exterior inspection of the aircraft with the First Officer, returning a few radio calls to Air Traffic Control (usually just repeating what they had said with Speedbird xxx at the end) and eating two lunches, as both the Captain and the SFO had brought their own.
There wasn't much time to be fiddling about with a cameraphone up there but I managed to get one or two interesting shots.
The Captain setting the Autopilot in response to an ATC instruction
During the walk-around with the First Officer at Geneva
Coming back into London that afternoon
Then I had the joy/misery of results from Module 1 today. I'm glad to say it was the former as all had gone well. I got an average comfortably above that which BA are demanding and was pleased from an OCD/plane geek perspective that my total marks for the subjects added up to 737.
Now we are well on with Module 2 - we have already done Performance which is very similar to Principles of Flight but with some slightly more practical stuff like reading from graphs to determine performance constraints on the aircraft.
Most of the last week has been General Navigation or GNAV, which I am finding very interesting. We have an excellent tutor and, while there is quite a lot of maths which personally I find quite daunting, he is very methodical and gives us lots of time to practise the necessary skills in class with him there to help. It's a big exam when the time comes with 60 questions in 2 hours, which at the moment feels like something of a tall order. However, by the middle of April, I'm hoping to feel a bit more fluent. We also were given our Jeppesen Airway Manuals which have sample charts (rather out of date by modern standards but usable for exam purposes) from which we can extract the relevant information about certain airport approaches and practise using the charts to work out how we might actually fly a great circle or rhumb line to get there.
A sample approach chart plus the CRP-5 computer (or Whizzwheel) which we use to calculate wind velocities and do various conversions from metric to imperial etc.
Will try to post something else interesting in the next few months but chances are it won't get much more exciting until April 24th when we fly out to NZ!
