Our syllabus, compared to a standard PPL, is made up of lot of solo hours, so this is what I've been mainly doing during the last month, starting from circuits and general handling lessons, in which we practice standard circuits, glide approaches, forced landings, stalls and all those kinds of maneuvers that have been taught to us.
It then turns into navigation, the big solo part of the training, which simply means flying from point A to point B, to point C [...] and usually back to point A (at least so far) without getting lost.
Described like this it may appear simple, but when you've got your flight at 6 o' clock in the morning it means you've got to plan the whole route in advance the day before (which usually takes about an hour) and then wake up even earlier on the morning of your flight to find out what the wind is like, in order to complete the planning with headings, times and fuel consumption for each leg.
Despite the lack of features here in Arizona (some of the waypoints are really really difficult to spot as they are usually dirt strips in the middle of the desert, which means they're the same colour), all the navs so far have been good (I've done 7 so far) and I've always made it back to Goodyear safe and sound, without getting lost or busting any airspace (which here is very easy to to).
On the dual side of flights recently we've mainly been doing Instrument Flying. That means we're under the hood from just after takeoff until just before landing and we have to perform the whole flight just looking to instruments (no looking outside). The G1000 avionics help a lot in this phase, therefore we are beyond the syllabus and have practiced some VOR tracking and I've managed to fly my first two ILS approaches into international commercial airports.
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| Me flying under the hood for the ILS approach into KIWA |
I will update you soon, night flights next week!
Stay tuned
Thanks for reading
