Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Christmas is coming and with that, a well-earned holiday period is near. Now it's time to see some red instead of blue :)

Santa has come to visit the terminal building of Helsinki-Malmi airport.

Next year the studying of blue books continues and I've heard that we'll start "lightly" with a mock exam on meteorology. Nice!

Maldivian Air Taxi

In these times of dark winter evenings, rainfall and coldness I'm sure many of us dream of warm faraway places with their eternal summer and sunny beaches. I've been spending some time researching all the different airlines operating in these places and dreamed about possible jobs in one of these companies. A great way to gather some extra motivation in the middle of a theory course!

They say you haven't lived if you've never flown Twin Otters in the Maldives. I suppose I'll never live then. At least I know a certain amount of our population is with me :)

One of the air carriers under closer inspection is Maldivian Air Taxi that operates a huge fleet of Twin Otters in the Maldivian islands flying people from an island resort to another. According to one of our teachers some finnish pilots have gone flying there in the past and it seems they still have at least an application form you can fill in their website, with requirements that are quite possible to meet.

Look at the size of that tailplane!

However it seems that the company has started to stricten its requirements and apparently you'll need a lot of seaplane experience to be applicable. In addition the Maldivian government has started to favour local pilots and it can be hard for expat first officers to gain work permits to the country. So practically it seems that unless you're a captain with thousand seaplane hours it might be quite impossible to get a job.

So, that's it about the motivation and back to the books! :)

Can one drown in blue books?

Theoretical studies continue and there's more than enough to learn. CPL theories are just something way different than PPL theories. The language has changed from Finnish to English and when AGK was formerly all about the systems of our little Cessna 152 we have now started tearing Boeings and Airbuses to pieces and exploring them. Navigation is now more like mathematics and all about calculating time differences, convergences and departures when it earlier was a kind of "there the church of Nikkilä is now" -kind of subject. Also, my "dear" flight computer has become increasingly familiar to me lately.

Our ground instructors are all in all quite decent. What's different from PPL studies is that we no longer have our schools own instructors teaching us. We now have freelancer instructors who are experts of diffferent subjects, mainly airline pilots, business pilots, air traffic controllers and technical people.

I'm planning on keeping a little break from writing. There's really not that much to say about theoretical studies. I wake up in the morning, go to school, sit there for six to seven hours and go home. The weeks pass by suprisingly fast now that I've become used to this kind of schedule after the randomness of the flight period. It seems now that the theory course should be over by April next year.

But before that, there's a little over 200 classroom hours of things to learn!