Plenty Of Reading...

This week I have made progress in reading most of the manuals I spoke about last week. Tomorrow and Tuesday mark the first in a series of IFR ground school days. During these days we should learn more about the next 2 types of aircraft we will fly (C172 & Twinstar), and the Instrument flying that will make up most of the training left.

Instrument flying is basically how pilots of commercial airliners operate. Rather than looking outside the aircraft for 80-90% of the time like we have been doing so far, we now focus on all the instruments inside the aircraft with very little visual references. Just like the airliners, we are now going to be introduced to glass cockpits. Whereas before we had an array of different instruments and systems, we will now just have one main system - the G1000 (shown below).

G1000

Luckily with home software being developed, we can now practise all of what we will be doing over the next few months on both our computers and iPads, which makes understanding the basic principles a lot easier. The outline for the rest of our time in NZ is as follows:

• 6 Twinstar Simulator Flights
• 8 Cessna 172 Flights
• 5 Twinstar Flights
• 6 Twinstar Simulator Flights
• 11 Twinstar Flights (including 3 profiles and 1 actual Commercial Pilots Licence skills test)

Home Simulator even with CTC Buildings & Apron

Hopefully I will have got some of the first 6 simulator flights done by next weeks update. It has now been 44 days since my last flight.....