Night flying above Helsinki

Feeling confident from the late night solo excersise, today I went to fly after sunset to see how Helsinki looked from the air at night. I very much liked night flying when we did the course last summer and was lucky to get an instructor who encouraged to continue flying at night every now and then. I also took my girlfriend with me since she also wanted to enjoy the view.

Katajanokka

After careful preparations and checking that the weather indeed was perfect, we managed to take-off in to the night sky. I immediately got a great feeling from the flight and was happy to notice that I didn't get any difficulties or extra pressure from night flying. After all, the surroundings are so familiar to me that it brings very much extra confidence to everything, it especially makes navigation easier. I still, however, plotted all the required radials and DME-distances to be able to fly back to the airport using only the instruments as a navigational reference.

Porvoo's oil refinery yet again. Looks like a city with skyscrapers.

Some instructors and therefore also students seem to have developed a strange fear and anxiety over flying at night but my personal attitude is that it's atmospheric, challenging and brings some very nice variety to daytime VFR-flying. After all, it is a totally normal and legitimate way to fly when you have the right plane, proper training and necessary equipment on board. And what's most important, it is very fun!

On final runway 18. The fact that the Airport Duty Office couldn't turn the PAPI-lights on brought some extra challenge to the landing!

My first flight this year!

Lately the weather has been very nice and this had led me to think more and more about going flying again after the long winter pause. Yesterday after school I went flying with my schoolmate sitting as a passenger in the C152 for the first time. We flew from Malmi to Nummela and Kiikala aerodromes and then returned back a while after sunset. I was supposed to go flying myself after this trip but it was getting late and I decided to go home instead and booked a plane for tomorrow.

EFHF at sunset

So today I took the OH-CVP and went flying. My main goal was to fly the compulsory three take-offs and landings in order to be able to carry passengers again so I first spent a few minutes in the traffic circuit whichafter I flew to the Porvoo training area to do some basic flying excersises. I did the usual slow flying, steep turns and stalls and was happy to notice how well everything went despite the couple of months of being in the ground.

It's getting dark..

 After I returned from this flight, I wanted to fly another one so I made all the necessary calculations and preparations and waited a while for the sun to start setting. My goal was to take off at sunset and fly for about an hour before returning and making one touch-and-go landing before coming to a full stop. This was in order to log the compulsory one take-off and landing at night to be able to carry passengers also at night.

Porvoo oil refinery at abut 18.40 local time.

Everything went well and although it wasn't pitch-black when I came to the landing, I logged the last 18 minutes as night time since it had already been over 30 minutes from sunset. In Finland's requlations, night is the time between sunset and sunrise when an unighted obstacle can't be clearly distinguished from 8km distance. As you can imagine, this definition is quite interpretational :)

OH-CVP

Promoting Glider Flying again

Our stand this year.

This time we were at Go Expo, which is focused on sports and activities. Our aim was to yet again to promote introductory flights for people interested in gliding and try to get some of them to start the glider course. What was different this year was that we no longer advertised only our own glider clubs but tried to get people join the sport itself and then pick a club most suitable for them.

All in all, it was fun to socialize with people and talk about aviation for a few hours. I think I'll go do this also at Model Expo, which is held next month.

First half of ATPL theoretical exams passed!

Last Thursday and Friday I took the official exams for the eight subjects we've been studying since last autumn and managed to pass them all on one go!

We had two consecutive days to do the exams and I chose to do Air Law, AGK Instruments, Human Performance & Limitations and both COM-subjects on the first day leaving General Navigation, Principles of Flight and Performance for the second day. The first day went quite fast since the subjects didn't involve a lot of calculations or complex problems, but rather just questions and answers you either remembered correctly or didn't. My second day of exams took much longer. I needed almost all of the time available to do the NAV and Performance subjects since they involved lots of calculations. Luckily I managed to handle the stress much better now than last time and didn't run out of time on any of the exams.

Eight exams passed, six more to go!

I'm happy with the results, although a few subjects like Performance and POF have gone a little better in the practice exams than they went now. However, there was also a few surprises like the 97% from Air Law, which was something I didn't expect after still being stuck in the 85% region on the day before, and getting 78% from the school exam..

In conclusion, this time around it feels like I've managed to learn from my mistakes. I studied much harder than last time when I took the CPL exams and I think it's thanks to the few failures that I now managed to get a better grip on things. In the CPL, the amount of work and motivation required came as a surprise to me but now I knew better what passing these exams with good scores actually takes. I think this is the case for many other students in my course too, since only two out of twelve passed the CPL exams first-time, but now in the ATPL course someone has yet to fail a single exam.

Now my current goal is to pass the remaining six exams on one go and would be very happy if my average score would start with a nine. So far it's looking good :)