My Mum came home one day and said she had some interesting news. She told me I had a T.I.F scheduled for the following Sunday (26th March) at 3pm. I was absolutely ecstatic! After all my hours on the simulator I was finally going to get my hands on a real aircraft! I also learnt that I would be beginning my Private Pilot License (PPL) theory course in a few months when the next course started. The feeling was sensational, knowing my flying career would soon make a start.

Sunday finally came, it felt like Christmas day! As we headed out to the airport (YSCB, Fairbairn) we remembered we had forgotten the camera! A little disappointing, but something as small as that was never going to dampen the day!

We walked into Brindabella Airlines’ building at the airport, and I was introduced to my instructor; Alex. He was a young guy, I’d say mid twenties. He took me back into the classroom for a brief ground lesson. He asked how much I knew about airplanes, and we got straight into it. He had a little toy Piper, with moving control surfaces. He asked me if I knew what they were, I told him. Then he explained how the ailerons, elevator and the rudder work. Beforehand , I knew what they did – I just didn’t know how. It’s now plain simple to me how the control surfaces work and what they do. After that, he brought out a large poster of a little Pipers cockpit. I told him how the rudder pedals worked, how to bank the wings with the control column and so on. It was a brief ground lesson, but I learnt a lot.

After that, Alex said I could do whatever I want! It was really fun, not having anything specific to do.  My only regret was not doing a yaw assisted turn, that is something I’ll have to try next time!  As I made a few turns I looked to the side and watched the ailerons as I turned the aircraft.  I was then told to fly to particular landmarks, such as big buildings and mountains.  The beauty of VFR was really demonstrated here! After a while, Alex asked where I was looking. I told him “the artificial horizon”.  He wanted me to take my eyes off the instrument panel and watch how the nose is relative to the horizon. I think the reason I was using my instruments was due to one thing. In the simulator, VFR flying is exceptionally difficult unless you have add-ons such as Mega Scenery, where landmarks are more accurately represented.  In the real world of course, it’s dead simple to know where you are whilst flying around an area your familiar with. From that point, I only checked my instruments to see how I was going, not for a primary source of navigation.

Week #2

Last week we covered the bare principles of flight – the boring stuff. Learning about forces and their properties is not fun, some of it is easy, some of it is more challenging – but every time Joe said “forces” he gave a chuckle as he knows we hate it. We’d be doing it for another 3 hours on Week 2, and in Week 3 we’d end up doing some more exciting stuff.

We booted off the night with the effect of wind during a climb – reasonably easy. Here’s a little snippet from my notes:

As you can see from above, pretty straightforward. We then moved onto the effect of flap on climb, and a basic principle I took in my notebook was more flap, more drag – therefore worse climb. With climbs covered, it was into the descending stage of flight.

Joe took us through the forces in a glide (we spent a lot of time on glides) and I noted a couple of primary facts. The basic principles of the content we were now covering is pretty simple, but I found if you missed something it would throw you off – that’s the most important time to scribble down notes, you may not know what it means – but later on you can check your references and from there you can work out what you’ve written down.

We went through the requirements for best glide, and like effect of wind etc this is well simulated in FS. All those “worthless” hours on the sim are well worth it, all that playing around I’ve done for years was starting to make sense. It helps to know what’s going on and what those dull old forces are up to, even if I haven’t played with these in a real airplane, but I plan to next time I go up. The sim does a fairly good job with the effects of the stages of flight – but generally you can’t trust the actual flight dynamics. Most sim pilots think they can land a 150 (even though they are easy to land once you’ve had real hours in the type) but in reality they’d stall on final and end up eating grass with the sheep.

The effect of flap during descents was next. Here are the basic notes I took:

• L/D ratio decreases
• Range decreases
• Steeper flight path
• Rate of descent increases

All of that can be simulated fairly accurately in FS, I’m still on the lookout for a good quality C150 for FS9 but until then I throw around the default 172 the next day and play around with what I’ve learnt.

We then did the effect of weight, again, really easy. Effect of wind in a descent, then effect of power. Only a short amount of time was spent on these, as they are fairly self explanatory. Just combine the principles of the effect of flight coupled with the principles of the effect itself and work it out, not hard at all.

Onto Turning. There are certainly more types of turns that I would have thought – but this topic proved very challenging. Funny thing is, it seemed hard in the classroom but in the next few days when you read over your textbook it seems to fill in the gaps that were missing on the night you were covering it.

Turning is a complex process. This is one area where the sim does a bad job at clearly depicting. In the sim, you pull your joystick to the side, airplane turns. Turn done. Not. Another area where sim pilots would fail. Miserably. Although I’ve only got a handful of hours to my name, the truth is that the sim takes a few shortcuts in the turning process – and this is why we blame Microsoft into fooling thousands of simmers they can fly an airplane.

There are factors in which FS seems to forget, such as balancing the ball, slip and skid, effects on the turning radius etc.

We then did climbing turns, again, don’t practice those in the sim – because nothing will really happen.

Next topic is stalls. The stall is basically the critical angle at which lift is maximum, and then when the aerofoil can no longer support the weight. We spent a fair bit of time on stalls, and the effects of stalls and the factors affecting the stall speed. Interestingly, there are 23 factors which affect stall speed. We were relieved when Joe told us we weren’t going to cover them all!

Next week we were told we’d do spins, spirals and watch a quick doco on how an airplane flies – a nice break from all the info being squashed into our heads.

Week #3

The past two weeks we covered how an airplane flies, the effects on each stage of flight etc. 

We started off the night with a video made in the 70s. Narrated by a bloke from Britain who sounded like he was king of the world, we got tired of him after about 5 minutes. The video took us through everything we learnt so far. It was interesting to physically see what the air is doing when it passes over the aerofoil, and what happens when lift and drag are in the picture. 

It was now time to start getting into more interesting stuff. I arrived at Brindabella a few minutes late but luckily they hadn’t started. As usual, it was straight into business. Joe kicked off with spins.  

Definition: a condition of stalled flight in which the aircraft describes a spiral descent, rolling, pitching and yawing until recovery is initiated by the pilot

Recovery:

• Close the throttle

• Full opposite rudder to direction aircraft is spinning or rotating

• Control column forward until spin stops (bit hard to do if you don’t have a lot of altitude!)

• Centralize rudder, level wings. (Obviously important not to over-yaw in the opposite direction,     otherwise you can start spinning the other way!)

• Ease out of the dive 

Joe said it can be sometimes difficult to know which way you are spinning, as all you can see out your windscreen is the ground constantly rotating – so we use the turn coordinator to help us in that situation. A point Joe stressed is that the last thing you want to do is to yaw the same direction as the spin, as results can obviously be disastrous. 

We then did Spiral Dives, which should not be mistaken for Spins. 

Definition: an aircraft in a steep turn with a steep nose down attitude and increasing airspeed 

Obviously the way to avoid a spiral dive is watch your AoB and keep the back pressure on the control column.

Recovery:

• Close throttle

• Roll wings level

• Relax elevator

• Ease out of the dive

For both recovery methods it’s important to read the flight manual, as some aircraft may have special steps which need to be taken. Everything we do in this course is based on the Cessna 150.

We finished up on those two subjects, we didn’t go through what is happening in regards to the airflow but the two subjects are nice and easy to comprehend. 

Now onto a subject that I’m familiar with: Communications. 

In aviation, we use VHF for communication and navigation. In some isolated areas of Australia only HF is available. We briefly went into how VHF and communications work, but we had to call it a night.   

Week #4

At the end of last week we touched Communications, today we went further into the subject covering more topics.

I only took two pages of notes, which is not a lot compared to the first few weeks. Mainly because I knew 75% of the content we covered and it required to “brain work”. I was nice and early this week – I spent roughly 90 minutes catching buses from home to the airport! When I got into the briefing room one of the ATSB guys who was absent last week came in. The new guy who came in the second week, Julian, has a hilarious sense of humour and started talking about how the guy missed the video last week. Julian made a really funny remark on the British narrator (who I spoke of last week) which had me and a couple of the other blokes in stitches.

In the video, they demonstrate some of the effects of climbing and descending. They show a kid on a bike going up and down a hill to demonstrate how it affects power. Julian said – “and that kid on the bike who probably got a football for riding that bike….Mummy, when can I stop, my stomach hurts!” It was bloody hilarious! When you compare the behaviour of everyone in the first week to now there are huge changes – everyone’s starting to open up more now and we always have a good yarn. With one woman who works for the Federal Transport Minister, two guys for the Safety Bureau, one baggage handler and of course an instructor with plenty of stories it always makes for some interesting conversation.

Anyway, down to business. We went briefly into bearings using VORs, but not really formerly. I suppose we’ll go into that officially later on. Here are two quick notes I took, not that they have any relevance to anything.  

• 1 nautical mile = 1,852 metres
• 1 knot = 1 nautical mile per hour
• 1 kilogram = 2.2 pounds

Joe told us to get a basic idea of aviation measurements and conversions, as they are really helpful if you don’t have them on you when you’re flying.  There are about 2 pages of them in my textbook, and I’ve started memorizing about 15 of them. Couple more notes: 

• QNH is hectopascal
• 1 US Gallon = 3.79 kilograms (unfortunately our American friends aren’t kind enough to configure cockpits for our metric system when making aircraft for other countries)
• 60 knots groundspeed = 1 nautical mile per minute

We then moved onto airspace. We went into the different classes of airspace and what their uses are. Airspace is a pretty long subject which isn’t very interesting. We covered a ton of topics that night; I could make a novel if I wrote about all of them. Here they are in dot point: 

• Visual Meteorological Conditions (VMC) – the weather conditions in which VFR type flights are permitted to fly
• Rights of Way – aircraft on the right has the right of way. If approaching head on, always turn right
• Aircraft separation on landing and takeoff
• How to detect and stay clear of other aircraft
• Airmanship (briefly. I suspect we’ll do into this more deeply in another week)
• Situational Awareness
• Prohibited, Restricted and Danger Areas (PRD)
• Aerodromes – taxiway, runway and other airport markings
• Windsock
• Aeroplane Landing Area (ALA)
• Standard Circuits
• Different licenses and ratings
• Logbook
• Aerobatic ops

It’s a long list that’s for sure. We probably spent 5 minutes on each of them, most was general knowledge but a lot was learnt in that period. 

That’s it for Week # 4! A lot of stuff covered, but the easiest week yet!

Happy landings,