Christmas holiday begins!

Now it's time to take a little break from studying and travel to Joensuu for some Christmas and New Year holidays. Merry Christmas to all fellow pilots and readers and see you next year! :)

ATPL studies continue..

A little update on the current situation:

We've now studied ATPL theories for a couple of weeks and a few subjects are only few hours short of completion already. Now it's only one week left until our Christmas break, whichafter studying will continue on the 8th of January. I thought it would take a long time for me to get accustomed on theoretical studying again but actually it was quite easy, even after the long period of just flying. So far studying has been quite fun and I enjoy my time in the class. I'm relieved that I didn't get the same "will this never end" - kind of desperation I experienced at the start of CPL theories!

The everyday view from the classroom. But wait, who's there at the apron? :)

What's also happened in the past few days is that we went to an employment-related seminar organized by FPA (Finnish Pilot's Association). It was specifically aimed at pilots who are currently unemployed or in training. There were representees of four Finnish airlines and each told basic information on the airline and its employment prospectives in the near future. In my opinion, the seminar was a nice opportunity to scan the participants a bit and meet people, but its content was quite useless. There really was not much new information and somehow I feel that some airline representees had lost the point completely. Their presentation was merely and advertisement for the airline. Who needs to know how nice and comfortable material are some planes seats made of in the current employment and market situation?


Here's a short overview of the presentations from the unemployed pilots perspective:

- One of the companies will recruit in the year 2016 at the earliest, but maybe not even then, and applying will be possible for anyone who is trained as a pilot provided that he/she has passed the psychological tests approved by the company. Currently this means that only students of a certain flight school can apply. Even if their evaluation was ten years old. Nice!

- Another company needs a few new pilots every now and then, and everyone is free to apply, but their demand for pilots will not be growing anytime soon and there will not be an open recruitment anytime soon.

- The third company's need for new pilots will be based solely on the current regional jet pilots returning back to the company from which they were borrowed a few years ago. All pilots can apply, and about 30-40% will be suitable, but there isn't going to be too much of vacancies in the near future.

- The fourth one doesn't recruit openly, but pilots can apply via email and rumour has it that one pilot has once gotten a job!

So, things aren't looking that good at the moment, but really I didn't learn many new things from the seminar and such there's no need to get all depressed over this. Everything just is like I knew it is. Hopefully it will get better one day.

My first post-CPL flight!

I've now completed my first flight as a licenced commercial pilot! I took the C152 and flew about an hour first in the traffic circuit and then at the training area.

AWB and a crisp winter afternoon

 I thought at first that it would be strange flying the Cessna 152 after a relatively long pause but I was surprised how well everything went. Maybe it's like riding a bicycle..

Almost all boats have been pulled up from the water. "Winter is coming!"

I originally thought that as soon as I get my license, I'll start asking for friends and relatives to come on board but since I got my license so late in the autumn, the weather's getting worse, days are getting shorter and most of my time is dedicated to theoretical studies, I guess I'll postpone those flights to next year. However, I'm happy that I got airborne at least once more this year :)

Heading back to Nokka.

I now have two flight time -related things to accomplish myself during other training. Firstly, I need to have 50 hours of Pilot in Command cross-country time before the IR checkride. The CPL flight training syllabus doesn't give that much hours for some reason. So I have about 3,5 hours left. Secondly, I have to have 200 hours of total time before I can start flying the King Air C90. If I consider the minimum of 15 hours I get from the IR course, I still have about 4 hours of flying left. These hours are supposed to be flown with own discretion and with the school's airplanes, and are included in the course and its price.