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.