IR Flight Training Complete

Yesterday I passed the IR Skill Test!

Time has gone by very quickly during the short flight training section of the IR(A) course and all in all it has been a great experience. Our main instructor was very relaxed and so we got the opportunity to turn even the more "boring" flight lessons, like maneuvering exercises into interesting ones by combining them with cross-country flying. Thus, almost all of the flights during the IR course were cross-country flights for us.

What was particularly interesting was a flight that we made to Bromma Airport in Stockholm. Flying abroad is a bit different than just staying inside Finland and provided for a nice extra challenge in terms of phraseology, flight planning, route planning etc. We managed fairly well in the end, I think.

Some pictures from along the way:

Fueling at Mariehamn

Taxiing to our stand at Stockholm-Bromma Airport

A whole set of traditional paper airway manuals on board!

Finally a better weather for true IMC training

It's very hard to put this into words what I mean, but let me try. At some point during the airline pilot training there comes a transition (or at least should come) that you start to think less about yourself as a student and become more focused on pre-developing a suitable version of yourself for the professional career ahead.

For me, this happened bit-by-bit along the whole school time but the most major turning point for me was the IR course. Before this course, flying has been more or less the same that I've gotten used to during my years of sports flying. Of course, the planning has become much more comprehensive and professional, as have the OFP's and the whole SOP culture that we have used in flying. Still, we have flown VFR flights with small single-engine planes, having a chart, a compass and a clock on board.

Instrument flying training is something different. You step outside of that familiar world of VFR, and for me at the same time came a realization that can only be summarized as "this is it". This is more or less what flying will be from now on. It won't just exponentially get more amazing, and I mean this only in a good way. You start to see the first glimpses of what your actual everyday job is going to be in the future, and that's a nice feeling.

The final Cessna flight

Today I finally managed to fly my last Cessna flight. As I've mentioned, we need to gain 200 hours before the King Air phase and 50 hours cross-country before the IFR evaluation flight. I've already gained these hours from flights outside school but still had about 45 minutes of prepaid Cessna-hours to fly. So today I took a friend with me and we went for a short trip to watch some night-time scenery over Helsinki. I decided I wanted to fly this flight in the night since it's so much more fun and gives a certain different feeling to the flight :)

Helsinki by Night

OH-AWB in the dark..

My very first IFR-flight!

Today I flew for the first time under IFR and it was a great experience!

The schedule today was to fly from Malmi to Tampere and then stay airborne for a while and do some ILS approaches at Tampere. After that it would be my flight-partners turn to fly a 2-hour local exercise. Then I'd fly a 1-hour basic instrument flight and finally my schoolmate would fly us back to Malmi.

I arrived to Malmi at 7 am and was lucky to get everything ready when at 9 am our instructor arrived. IFR flight planning is a bit different and still doesn't go as smoothly as it will hopefully go in the future, when I've done it more. There's a bit more things to consider than in VFR, like the weather minimums, alternate aerodrome planning and more thorough fuel calculations. However, some things are more simple, like route planning and plotting headings and tracks. You don't really need to know what random neverheard-village is below you :)

We got about ten seconds of IMC-time furing the flight..

We took off from Malmi and got a clearance to initially maintain runway heading (180) and climb to 3000 feet, which after Helsinki Radar vectored us straight over Helsinki-Vantaa to our planned route (RNAV Route P854) and cleared us to FL080. To my slight disappointment, the weather was perfect and I only got to go through a very thin layer of clouds. For the first time in my aviation career, I hoped that the weather would be worse.. There was some broken clouds at 600 feet to be expected at Tampere but of course it was just the remainders of morning fog and disappeared quite fast leaving behind a dull CAVOK message from all nearby weather stations.

Backseat luxury

I realized that it is actually somewhat easier to fly under IFR than under VFR. Not considering all the problems arising from being in actual IMC with some troubles and difficulties, in normal operations it truly is much easier to fly IFR than VFR. You get much better service, someone always tells you exactly what to do, who to contact, what altitude to maintain and what heading to fly, and if not, you just follow the magenta line in the GPS and don't really have to worry about anything. At least until the approach segment starts..

ILS to EFHK RWY 15 whichafter VFR to Malmi

The flight went quite smoothly and so did the approaches at Tampere. We were under radar vectors for the whole time and the workload was low so we even had time to discuss different subjects with the instructor  and my flight-partner. Our instructor is what I consider one of the best in our school since he is a master in creating a relaxed and happy atmosphere and this gives you maximum performance during flight.

All in all, the day was awesome and I very much look forward to flying more IFR-flights!

Final FNPT flights!

Yet another phase is behind me :)

I've now flown all of the FNPT simulator exercises (35 of them) and logged about 38 hours in the simulator, with another 38 observing from the right seat. I can't believe I've spent over three consecutive days in the sim!

OFP

Our last three flights were cross-country exercises. The first one was from Malmi to Lappeenranta which after we did some approaches so that the whole flight lasted about two hours. The next day it was time to fly from Malmi to Tampere and the last one was from Helsinki-Vantaa to Turku, which after we made a diversion to Tampere. The last flight was a so-called evaluation flight, where the school evaluates whether our progress has been good enough in order to move to the real airplane.

All in all these flights were quite demanding, since we also had to do all the necessary preflight planning as if we were about to fly the flights in real-life. Luckily I got overall above-than-average grades from the evaluation, despite a few embarrassing mistakes.

Now it's time to move on.. The Piper Turbo Arrow IV awaits, yet again! :)

Finland International Airshow @ EFHF

One week after Tour de Sky there was the Finland International Airshow held at Malmi Airport and yet again I was on duty promoting the school. This time we had quite a lot on offer since examples from our whole fleet we're there for the public to see, including four C152's, the C172. one Piper Turbo Arrow and our sister company Scanwing's King Air C90 (which I'll be flying later on in our training) and even our flagship, the Cessna Citation CJ2+ business jet.

The weekend was fun, although I was very tired when it ended!

Pic's, or it didn't happen:

The C152's on display

Cessna 172 Crew ;)

One of each type we're flying in our training

FNPT Instrument Approaches

Simulator training has now progressed to the point that we've currently been doing approach flights. Basically we're spending the whole 1-hour session doing a certain approach procedure usually either on both ends of the runway or to one direction only. These approach flights have been a bit more challenging than doing only holdings or radio navigation exercises but still I don't feel like there's too much to handle.

ILS Y to RWY 15 at Helsinki-Vantaa

We started with a few ILS precision approach flights and continued with a few more VOR-based non-precision approaches, followed by NDB approaches and then went back to flying ILS's. All of these differ somewhat and in my opinion, although ILS is the precision approach and guides you usually very close to the runway center line, which makes it quite comfortable and induces quite a low-workload after you've adjusted to the procedure, I somehow like doing also the VOR and NDB approaches. There's a certain amount of fun included in the fact that they are not so precise and so you don't have to have everything so spot-on as in the ILS approaches. It is easier to accept that you might be a little high on the glide path or a little bit to the side. It's hard to explain, but all in all I think it has been very fun doing all of these interesting approaches.

We also flew one RNAV approach flight, and it seems they are also quite easy and you usually have very much time in your hands since the procedures are quite long usually. RNAV seems to be the way of the future so I think I'll be doing these quite a lot more in the future.

Also one interesting exercise was the circling approach, although it was pretty hard to simulate it since there's no side-view's in our FNPT trainer. In the circling approach, you basically do an approach to one runway and when you get it in sight, you circle to the opposite end of the runway visually keeping the runway in sight and then land visually. They are done usually if only one side of the runway has an instrument approach and the wind favors the opposite end, or if there is some kind of an obstacle that prevents approaching the intended runway directly (like a mountain, for example). Very interesting.

Lastly, there was the SRA and PAR approaches. These are somewhat rare and strange approaches, since the PAR, for example, is a precision approach that requires the plane to have a VHF radio only! The approach, flying to the correct direction and descending at the correct rate in relation to the runway is all done with the voice of a qualified ATCO, and eventually you find yourself from the runway. The SRA is basically a non-precision brother of the PAR.

So, only a few flights left and then it's time to move to the real airplane!

Tour de Sky @ Oulu Airport

I got a chance to go to an airshow called Tour de Sky, which was held at Oulu Airport in northern Finland to present our school once again. We flew there with the school's Piper Turbo Arrow OH-PGA with three other schoolmates and stayed for the weekend. It was very nice to get a chance to fly cross-country with the Piper. We flew to Oulu via Jyväskylä so everyone could fly at least one leg.

Flight to Oulu, sitting as a passenger on the right seat

The weekend went nicely and people were quite interested in our Piper and school overall. It was nice to get to talk to different people and of course see all the airshow participants. There was quite a lot of jets, for example an Italian team called "Frecce Tricolori" consisting of ten jet fighters doing formation flying. Other memorable show's were the F-16 Demo Team from Holland and the MIG-29 from Eastern Europe.

Our nice PGA on display

SL's Dream Team

The crowd was quite interested in our aircraft, but we were more interested on the fighter jets ;)

Frecce Tricolori

A real 1:1 Hawker Hurricane. We got a chance to get a closer look on this beauty at Jyväskylä airport, where we both happened to land to refuel. 

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