A Busy Week

It's fair to say I have been a lot busier in the last week than the previous. I’ve been in for 6 out of the past 7 days for 2 mass briefs and 4 simulator events. The good news though is that we still had time to enjoy the south coast sunshine!!!

After completing the final UK Orientation flight on Monday, Tuesday was the day that 3 of us had our introduction to Autopilot flight. This was by far one of the easiest flights I’ve had since starting CTC. With only hands on flying for the initial departure and last stage of landing, it demonstrated all the different functions that our system has to offer and how useful the autopilot can be for reducing workload.

The last 2 flights that I had this week were the first half of the 4 LOFT sorties. The LOFT sorties are where we act as though we are flying a single-pilot commercial flight from A to B; All planning, routes and decisions are down to us and we have all the equipment in the aircraft available to us – GPS, Autopilot, MFD (Multi-Function Display with moving map), etc. Another component to these flights is to see how we deal and cope with emergencies and poor weather leading to diverts. So far I’ve only had to deal with an engine failure during a go-around, but from other cadet's experiences I think there is going to be quite a lot to deal with in the final 2 of these flights.

Loft Flight Planning - Departure from Heathrow for Birmingham

Even though we've been busy working hard, we have still managed to find a bit of time to relax - this week a few of us had a round of golf and a beach BBQ. Hopefully we will be busy again this week, although the Instrument Rating skills test is approaching fast, only 12 more flights for me......