Progress Test 2

Since the night flying it's been mainly IFR and solo cross country flying. The next milestone to follow was my second progress test. As I've mentioned, at Oxford you have four of them, each with different requirements that will prepare you for the huge CPL skills test at the end.

Progress Test 2 mainly focuses on general handling, emergency procedures and circuits with different types of landings. It all depends on which examiner students get too as they all have their own style of examining. By that I mean some will give students the freedom to go to their favourite area and some will give you a specified area to go to. Either way students get assessed on the same criteria.

The first part of the test involved an hour long quiz on the ground, I was asked to brief the weather and weight and balance. I was also quizzed about the airframe, engine and the charts. Wasn't anything too out of the ordinary, although I did have to think carefully when I was asked to describe a naturally aspirated engine! Generally though, students should be relatively clued up about this stuff by PT2.

After the quiz, I was then briefed about what was expected of me in flight. I did the sensible thing and preflighted the aircraft before going in for the briefing, so that saved a lot of time and it meant that we could takeoff a lot sooner. The flight begun with a Chandler departure, which is basically a south west departure involving a transition through Chandler Airport's airspace. Once out in the practice area I did a clean stall and a stall in the landing configuration. On these stalls you're expected to do what's called a HASELL checklist, which stands for Heading, Aircraft configuration, Security (Objects), Location and Lookout. This checklist ensures that it is safe for you to start performing stalls.

After some general handling, my examiner put me under the hood for some instrument time. He gave simply instructions such as altitudes to climb/descend to, headings to turn to, climbing/descending turns. All at rate one of course. After that I was told to go to Ak Chin Regional Airport which is an uncontrolled airfield where I was asked to perform a normal, flapless, glide-in and a performance landing, however as I was en-route the examiner cut the power and said "engine is on fire!". I got straight to it, and covered all of the engine fire checklist, had my pretend landing site in view all the way down. Worked out to be one of the best PFLs I had ever done!

After the PFL I continued to Ak Chin Regional, which was interesting because the runway was very narrow and I had never done a landing there before! After completing all of these landings, my examiner had me do the Chandler arrival back into Falcon Field to finish up. The arrival was very busy and I had to wait a good 5 minutes before I could actually make my first call to inform tower that I was coming in for a full stop!

After successfully touching down, I got my debrief. Overall I was told that it went very well but of course, there is no such thing as a perfect check ride so my examiner did tell me to work on things such as checklists, and more back pressure when flaring since some of my landings were slightly flat. The part that I was most worried about were the practice forced landings since their success depends on so many variables such as: what fields are available, the wind direction, type of terrain and how high you are. Even when you are told to go-around, care needs to be taken when dropping flaps as a lot of other students have partialled due to dropping flaps too early or when specified speed and height criteria have not been met.

Overall I was pretty happy with the test, and thankfully I had no real disaster problems so I can concentrate more on the next progress test which will be on Navigation. As I mentioned, there is no such thing as a perfect checkride or even flight for that matter. We are all human and we make mistakes from time to time, especially during checkrides because so much is going on at the same time. It is important that the criteria are met and that the flying is safe. It is also vital not to crack under pressure, even when a mistake has been made I know that I have to just carry on with the test and not give up because you could be given a chance to redeem yourself, or even a chance to redo a certain exercise to show that you can do it. 

The next step from here is more IFR and Navigation flying. I also have several landaway solos which I am really looking forward to, and shall be the topic of my next blog post. Once again, thank you for reading and all the best!

Night Flying

Once again sorry for the delay, and I know that I've already apologised for before for the long break in my blogging! I do have quite a few posts to catch up on, however as the titles suggest, I will be talking about the absolutely spectacular night flying.

Sunset prior to my first night lesson

In the Oxford programme, you do 3 hours of dual night flying, 1 hour and a half of which is cross country, and you also get 2 hours of solo night time which is just flying in the traffic pattern with a minimum requirement of at least 10 landings.

The first lesson I had was a dual with my instructor which teaches flying circuits. I learned how to look for certain visual reference points at night, for example; light signals from airports and how to notice airports in cities. My instructor also made a big deal over night vision, and made sure that I dimmed the avionics as much as possible, even shining a torch inside the flight deck is potentially dangerous because it takes a long time for us to adapt back to night vision, and that's not something to want.

The first thing that struck me was how different everything feels and just how much extra care you need to take. Even with the taxi, I had to really concentrate to keep a visual of the centreline. The actual flying is very alien at first, everything that I was used to using as visual reference points were pretty much non existent, and you have to quickly get used to where certain lit landmarks are. Landing was very interesting too, the papis are evermore important on final approach. When I came to reducing power and flaring for touch down, it felt so different compared to the visual reference that I was used to during the day.

The lights over Tucson

The first landing I made at night was of course atrocious, afterwards that I started getting used to it pretty well. I ended up doing a couple of normal landings, then a couple of glide ins and flapless landings. The next lesson was a night cross country to Tucson International airport. The route I planned was out to the north of Falcon Field, then south with a transition over Phoenix Skyharbor airport. The transition looked incredible, seeing Skyharbor below along with Downtown Phoenix was really something. The rest of that navigation flight was so intense, I found it challenging to read the map and even controlling the lighting from my torch just to be sure that I didn't blind myself or the instructor! The approach to Tucson went quite well. It was the first time I had ever landed at an International airport so it was a great experience to be able to see what it was all about.

Stop at Tucson International

The last two flights I had at night were solo circuits. It was so much fun and I remember how enjoyable my old circuit lessons were. I practiced pretty much all the different kind of landings that are expected of me. My second night circuit was particularly challenging because of the winds becoming stronger as I flew, but as you can see, my heart is still beating!

Short final into Falcon

Night flying is something I'll always remember, and I was honestly so sad when I tied that aircraft down after the last night circuit, knowing that I won't be doing that for a while. It was just such a humbling moment as I saw the city lights tilting towards me as I got higher, looking out into the horizon and just see a carpet of what looks like a million fairy lights. Night flying has to go down as the most memorable things to date since I started training.