Flying with the Zephyr!

A very nice anticyclone has decided to rest and stay over Finland and for a long time now I have enjoyed beautiful early spring weathers. Every day there's a clear beautiful sky with cirrus clouds, and the weather is mild and very calm. So with a sports licence in my pocket why wait for the beginning of the flying period in my flight school?

So I've now been flying with the ultralights in my aviation club..

Mäntsälä Aviation Club's Atec 122 Zephyr, OH-U645 at Utti military airport. With this, you can almost land on the runway... ...sideways!

So I've been flying the Atec 122 Zephyr ultralight, which is a quite fast two-seater airplane with a low-wing configuration. This is the same type of plane I flew when training for my licence so it's quite familiar to me. I've logged about 70 to 80 hours with the Zephyr.

At Lahti-Vesivehmaa EFLA, this time flying the U635.

Since my last flight with this type was over three months ago, according to my clubs regulations I had to book a review flight with an instructor. So we took off and did some basic stuff like stalls and coordinated turns in the training area near Helsinki-Malmi after which I embarked on a solo flight circling the city of Helsinki. A few days after that I went cross-country flying for the first time this year. I planned a flight to Hyvinkää airfield and from there to Utti military airport and back to Malmi. I've also now flown again to Hyvinkää to train landings on a slippery runway.

My most recent flight was to Lahti-Vesivehmaa. There I came across a little incident when brakes on the left wheel of the main undergarriage decided to freeze and I had to call the maintenance people form our club to help since there was no suitable tools onboard the airplane. The Result: three hours of waiting in very cold and windy conditions at the airfield. Fortunately I came across some flight instructor of the local flight school and I got access to the airfields "tower" where there was warm.

ATPL Online

Here's a short introduction to one of the secret weapons used by flight students helping them to cope better through the CPL and ATPL theoretical examinations.

A King Air in the front pages contributes to motivation nicely. Recently it has been replaced with an even better source of motivation, the A380!

ATPL Online is an online question bank, which you can use to practise for the different theoretical subjects included in the CPL and ATPL syllabus. The bank contains more than 10 000 different multi-choice questions, which are taken from the same question bank used in the real examinations. So with this online site you can practise questions either by category, by random or by doing mock exams that work the same way as the real ones. If you answer a series of more than 20 questions you can get your score to show on a recent progress table, which shows your progress as a linear graph. With hard work this graph is then supposed to show an upward trend...

The only graph I had the nerve to post a picture of :)

Using ATPL Online has many benefits and here's three of them:

Firstly, by doing hard work and taking the questions you always learn something new from the subject you are rehearsing. There are lots of situations where the same question is asked multiple times and as a result you'll begin to remember the answers easily. Especially all the different questions which have a sort of "rule of thumb" to remember them by, like relationships between IAS, TAS, CAS etc., compass errors and certain laws of aerodynamics, can be quite easily mastered by repetition.

Secondly, answering the questions in the bank helps to develope answering technique. Although one might think that a multi-choice question with four alternatives wouldn't need much technique, there's actually quite a lot required. With frequent rehearsing you'll learn to avoid the most common traps and you'll also begin to pick up important clues from the questions. By trial and error you might someday also learn to read the whole question before answering. Actually, the most important advice I've received considering the theoretical exams is a rule of thumb called RTFG. It stands for "Read the F.... Question". Works pretty well, and if all else fails the correct answer is the longest one, or option C, or in case of Principles of Flight, the one that contains the word "fowler flap".

Fowler flaps is always the right answer, regardless of the question asked :)

The third benefit is that with hard work and answering thousands of questions you'll eventually learn quite a large part of the correct answers by heart, without even thinking what is asked. This is very useful as you'll encounter the same questions in the real exams. Additionally, if you just can't get some certain things in your head, you can develope your own rules of thumb and memorize the questions and answers by heart. After all, it is sometimes much easier than actually working to undestand the subjects in depth. Of course, this only works for a small amount of little pieces of information contained in subjects. For example, if you just can't work in your mind the relationship between two things, then just remember that if the question has "increase" in it, the answer is "decrease" and so on.

This is again one of these questions... deepest?

ATPL Online doesn't come for free. You have to pay for registering and I subscribed for 90 days with a price of 74 euros. You'll certainly get your moneys worth and I think we don't have one student who didn't subscribe to this service.

A Flight to Italy!

Now it's time to embark on a small four day break from the world of CPL-theories and head for Rome on the wings of Norwegian. Be back soon! :)

There it is now! Had to book good places by the window beforehand. I actually know a better place situated in this airplane where I'd rather be, but it's a secret. Hint: It is located somewhere in the front part ;)

Somewhere over the alps...

Greetings from the World of Books

New Year and a new begin... well, the same old theory lessons continue and the end is not near :)

Some new subjects have started and with that, new ground instructors have come to alter our daily routine. Some lessons seem to pass by in an instant while some lessons seem to last forever. But so it goes.

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!