Michael’s Flight Training Diary

I’ve just acquired a share in a fine specimen of a PA28-181 Archer II, based at High Wycombe.

It will comfortably carry two adults and bags sufficiently far at 110kts that toilet breaks are more of a concern than range, or four adults and a little baggage a slightly lesser distance. It appears well-looked-after, the group seems sensible with a professional attitude, and it’s got the maintenance and environment of British Airways Flying Club to keep it in good working order. There seem to be plenty of available slots on the group’s online booking system. And they seem like a nice bunch of people - they’ve even let me be part of the group.

Next step: become competent at flying it!

Sorry for the downtime. My hosting provider went bust last week, and their wholesale server provider pulled the plug on Thursday. Thanks to the nice people at gnax.com, I managed to retrieve the database and config for the blog, and it’s now back up with a new hosting provider. Moral of the story: take regular backups of your hosted content!

Flight writeups and photos will follow soon of the wonderful flights I did in New Zealand last month. If you do one thing before you die, you must fly a little plane amongst really big mountains with a really experienced mountain instructor. The memories will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Here is a pictorial guide to the new Bendix-King AV8OR. It’s very simple to use - the entire user interface is via the touch screen. It’s parked on my living room table, the GPS antenna can see the window. Let’s see what we can see.

This

Oh look. My house is just inside Brize Zone.

Touch the screen, and the soft buttons appear. 

If you touch the map, it goes into “pointer mode”: a pointer appears, and if the pointer is on anything of significance, it tells you what it is and pops up a “More info” button. Press the “More info” button…

It’s an airport, too much info for one page: let’s see the next page:

OK, clear the airport info. What does it say about Brize Zone?

More info…

What’s that obstacle?

More info…

Oh look, a MATZ.

More info…

Weston-on-the-Green Danger Area:

There’s a city:

There’s more info even about that:

Right, let’s go and make a flight plan. Go into Flight Plan mode, select “New FP”, and add my home airport:

Now, let’s track down a random tiny village in rural Herefordshire. Start typing, and it auto-completes:

Let’s check the details:

OK, let’s go there! OK it to add to the flight plan…

Switch from data view to map view:

Oh, that town to the north must be Hereford. Let’s go there: touch the map, goes into pointer mode…

That’s right. Add it to the flight plan as a waypoint:

Let’s look at the data. The data fields in the table are customisable, and there’s a large selection of fields that can be chosen from.

OK, let’s end the flight at Shobdon. Select the end of the FP and hit “Insert”, and start to type the destination:

A number of items match Shobdon - yes, it’s the “airport” I want.

Let’s check the data, press “More info”:

OK, there’s the data. 71.3nm, and it’ll take 45 minutes at the airspeed configured in the main settings.

Save the flight plan, and it’s ready to fly alongside my other plans…

Now, I haven’t yet taken my new toy for a cross-country sortie, but there’s a “Demo Mode” that demonstrates what it’s like in-flight:

Right, I understand that I’m not flying just north of Plymouth.

Turn on the Vertical Profile view, and it shows the terrain and airspace ahead on the current track. There’s a particularly good illustration of it in the final picture further below.

You can toggle the map into relative terrain height mode:

Or turn the terrain off completely.

The data fields on the left side are customisable from a huge range, and there’s actually nine of them active at once, of which four are visible. They’re arranged as a nine-high vertical ribbon, and to view the others, just run your finger up or down to move the selection.

You can zoom in. Oh look, there’s a VRP:

Zoom out…

I left the demo running for an hour or so and forgot about it. Oh look, I’m just approaching north Wales, and the terrain and airspace ahead is looking much more interesting, even though the main map view is zoomed too far out for airspace boundaries to be displayed. (Ignore the white blob, it’s the reflection of a light). Looks like I’m going to have to climb to avoid some high ground ahead, whilst simultaneously descending to avoid airspace. Hmm, time to consider my options…

Flown today: 2h 15m

Total time to date:  59h 10m

Today, I passed my skills test. With the QXC and RT Practical under my belt, that’s it - I’m going to get my PPL.

Life has made it somewhat difficult to keep the blog up to date over the last couple of months. I’ve been writing brief notes after each revision lesson to capture the learning points, but I didn’t turn them into prose. Well, to hell with it - I’ll put them all live now, and go back and prosify them when I get round to it in the near future.

It was a beautiful day this morning, quite unexpected given the previous weather forecasts, and the flight over the Wiltshire Downs was quite spectacular. It’s so exciting, thinking what I’ll soon be able to do with my PPL. So many places I want to visit with Laura, my girlfriend: Herefordshire, the Brecon Beacons, Caernafon, Land’s End, northern England on a trip to Carlisle, western Scotland… they’re all waiting for us.

The immediate future? Finish this glass of champagne. Ponder which GPS I’m going to buy - currently contemplating the new Bendix-King AV8OR. Book a session of circuits to keep my hand in while I wait for my license to come from the CAA. Plan the route of my first flight under my inbound license - down over Oxford, along the Ridgeway to Devizes, up and across the Severn Estuary, up Hereford past my mum’s house, to Shobdon - sounds like a plan. Laura suggests I should re-read The Killing Zone, which seems sensible. Practice some PFLs, which are possibly my weakest point.

So many things to do.

This spring and summer, I flew flying lessons on:

27th March

13th & 21st May

4th June

15th August

To this week, that’s 26 weeks. Of them, I’ve had flying lessons booked all but five of the weeks (due to holidays, business trips and some other work commitments), and of those weeks, I’ve probably averaged about 1.5 bookings per week. That’s five lessons flown, and 27 lessons cancelled due to weather. At the rate I’m going, it looks like September will join April and July in the dubious distinction of having had no flyable lesson bookings at all, despite having three lessons a week booked for most of the month.

The savings are building nicely, though!

The mid-summer “monsoon season” put paid to several bookings in a row over the last six weeks, delaying my pre-QXC flight again and again. Now the weather is nice, but the flying school is booked solidly for the next two weeks. The way these things come together with work commitments taking me away for a week at a time, it looks like I won’t have a shot at the pre-QXC until the second week of August, nearly ten weeks since I last flew.

Will I even remember how to fly?

In the winter, there’s plenty of good weather but the lack of light evenings (and my general unavailability at weekends due girlfriend) make it hard to fit flying in. In the springtime, the evenings quickly get light… but the weather is unflyable 80% of the time.

I’ve flown three times in the last three months. Turbulent, wet, frontal weather has persisted now for two months, and there’s no end in sight. There’s typically one flyable day a week, and without more flexibility in my personal schedule, it’s so hard to regularly take advantage of good weather.

(posted late, because I forgot to press the “Publish” button…) Another week, another three lessons cancelled due to weather. Two of them were quite horrendous weather, but Tuesday was looking perfect: fresh and sunny, great visibility, a few light cumulus at 3500, Brize METAR indicating 8 knots westerly… but at Oxford, it was 10-15 knots perpendicular to the runway. Damn.

Still, this next coming Tuesday is currently looking good. Let’s hope for the best.

Had a perfect forecast yesterday for my latest lesson of circuit-bashing at 18:00: 5kt variable winds, scattered mid-level cumulus and gin-clear visibility. But the phone rings about 15:00, and it’s PFT. Apparently, it’s “too windy”. Hmm… it’s three and a half hours until I get airborne, and on cumulus-filled summer days like yesterday the wind often seems to die down in the early evening. I’m really not convinced. But also… the aircraft “has gone tech”.

OK, so I’m not going flying. Instead, I sat at home, and listened to the ATIS at 18:30… 8-10 kts close to the runway.

<sigh>

15-20kts with CBs floating around this evening. Six cancellations in a row, now - 4/18 = 22% of lessons flown.