Not Long Left Of Ground School...

It’s been a while since my last update and as you’ve probably guessed, quite a lot has happened.

Firstly, CP107 have almost finished groundschool! With only eight more days of teaching before we enter the exam period again, the end of groundschool is well and truly in sight! Module 2 seems to have gone a lot faster than the first, it doesn’t seem like 5 minutes since we were sat in that exam hall wondering whether to pick A, B, C or D! Since we only sat 6 exams in module 1 it means we have 8 this time round, which are Performance, Mass and Balance, Air Law, General Navigation, Radio Navigation, Flight Planning, Human Performance and Limitations and finally Operational Procedures. The work has been quite different in comparison with many of the subjects requiring you to actually perform calculations to work certain things out rather than just wordy type questions, however I have found it more interesting.

GNav

I also helped out at the last CTC careers event. It was a very busy day but highly enjoyable, I also managed to get into the 737-800 simulator to help out with the running of it throughout the day which was an added bonus!

We recently applied for our New Zealand student visa which definitely means it getting close. In fact, it’s just dawned on me that it’s now next month that we are due to go! I can’t wait to get out there to fly, but for now I am just focusing on passing all of the exams!

A few of us had a trip to Cardiff last week to visit the General Electric engine maintenance facility nearby. It was very interesting to get an insight into the maintenance side of things and the work the engineers do with the engines if airlines report that they have been having problems with them. Throughout the day we saw the engineers working on engines off A320’s, A380’s and 777’s. A wide variety of airlines get their engines maintained by GE Wales including British Airways, easyJet, Korean Air, Singapore Airlines and Emirates. We also managed to see the engine casing off a GE90, which is the largest engine in production. It is hard to imagine that one of those hangs off each wing of a 777 producing 115,000lbs of thrust each; they are easily over 20ft in diameter!

GE90 making the fuel truck look small!

As part of our Radio Navigation course, we got time in the simulator again, we were split into groups and I had my turn today. It was an excellent session where we were putting into practice the navigation aids that we have been learning about in class such as VOR’s, NDB’s and ILS. We took off from Belfast in the Boeing 737-300 and then tuned in the Belfast VOR to look at the instrument readings, this could tell us how far away we were from it and what course we had to turn to intercept it. We made an ILS approach and let the plane perform an autoland while we watched the instruments, then we had a turn landing it ourselves which was great fun!

On another note, just been looking at cars in New Zealand, and found this bad lad. http://turners.co.nz/Cars/Search/Toyota/Starlet/1151714/