Progress

Apologies once again for the lack of update - will correct this properly in short order.

In the meantime, the following question appeared in a Meteorology progress test the other week - inserted by my (scots) Met instructor as a mid-exam joke:

"Which of the following statements is true concerning the Stevenson Screen?

a) It is a wooden, louvred box, sited approximately 4 feet above the ground, and often painted a non-metallic bright pink colour, in order to assist the met man in finding it in thick fog.
b) It was invented by Robert Louis Stevenson's father.
c) It is usually situated above a concrete surface as the Health and Safety Executive have identified risks associated with the met man slipping on wet grass while trying to read the instruments.
d) It is traditional that on the night of the vernal equinox a small measure of single malt scotch whisky is placed in the Stevenson Screen, in honour of St. Steven, the patron saint of met men."

Answers on a postcard please...

April Fool

Thought I'd share with you my favourite aviation-related April Fool of the year. I particularly like the discussion of the issues presented by the aircraft's motion...

Yes, I'm still alive...

...in spite of appearances; apologies all for not updating in over a month - it's a fair cop, but I blame being busy...

I'm now in the middle of Week 10, and can't entirely believe that it's been that long - it's one of those crazy time-distortion things, where the time has flown by, and yet we feel like we've been here forever.

Progress Test 1, otherwise known as the Week 9 Exams, were (surprise, surprise) last week, and were somewhat nerve-wracking, but I did fine in them - passed everything, with a 90.75% average. Very pleased with the result - if I can average over 90% on the JAA exams I'll be extremely happy indeed - the pass mark is 75%, but most airlines are looking for 85% generally.

In other news, the school has cottoned on to my vague tendency to hide behind a camera at every opportunity, and is gratefully taking off me photos of the school's aircraft for publicity use - something I'm very happy to help them with.

There is currently talk about getting some air-to-air work done, which would be fantastic, just for the experience. We'll see how that one goes.

In these photographic endeavours I have been ably assisted by a fellow student and expert photoshopper, Mike.

Things coming up: for Easter (when I get Good Friday off) my parents, sister and girlfriend will be joining me for the weekend and we'll be doing many fun touristy things.

I'm rather looking forward to getting away for a while - there's a concept round here of Blue Gate Fever (referring to the main gates to the campus, and how if you haven't left them in a while you can start to wonder if there really is a world out there) and the potential for going stir-crazy is considerable.

That ought to do the trick for now. I hearby promise to try and update this more often - hopefully at least once a week - and to try and say more interesting things...

Before I go, one quick plug, for the travel blog of two friends of mine. Enjoy!

Crash

Sorry once again for lack of updates. Thought I'd pass this on about Wednesday's accident involving one of FTE's Warriors: the local paper has a good picture. If anyone is able to furnish me with a rough translation of the Spanish, t'would be fantastic.

Information so far is that the engine failed downwind in the circuit (solo student), and he put it in a field on realising he wouldn't make the runway. The landing was apparantly textbook up until the point where it hit a small ridge in the middle of the field (which hadn't been visible from above), which took out the landing gear. The pilot walked away from it though, which is the important thing.

More than that, we'll have to wait for the accident report...

The Story So Far...

In the beginning, the universe was created...

...actually, let's skip on a bit from there (with apologies to the late Douglas Adams). Grovelling apologies also for not having updated this recently - it's been rather a frantic couple of weeks. Anyway, I shall attempt to summarise the last couple of weeks of life at FTE. Wish me luck...

I arrived on that Thursday evening after the weird and wonderful journey (as retold in excruciating detail previously) and was met at the airport by one of my course mentors, Annie. Course Mentors (of the student variety - another variety appears later) are students on a more senior course (there are about 10 courses starting per year, each with between 8 and 14 students, average about 12 I think) who are assigned to a new course to help them settle in, show them the ropes, get them drunk, etc. Thursday ended with a visit to the bar (very very cheap drinks, models of aircraft made from beer cans stuck to the ceiling) and an introduction to the rest of my course, who were already there, having flown Ryanair on the Wednesday.

Friday during the day involved all the various admin-type things: lots of paperwork, photographs for the air-side pass, uniform fitting, introductions to various important people, and picking up the course materials. This turned out to be a leather flight case with various odds and ends in, and the 9 large ring binders with the Phase 1 course notes on. It's at this point that it hits you just how much you've got to learn in the next 19 weeks...

Having done all of this, we were released from the interminable mountain of paperwork in time for Happy Hour at the bar. Inconceivable though it may seem, the €1.80 Beer is reduced significantly in price on Fridays from 5 to 6pm, and Saturdays from 8 to 9pm. Following this quite healthy warm up, we were taken in to town for the traditional FTE night out. This apparently involves several drinks at a bar, followed by dinner at a Mexican restaurant (where, while waiting for a table, our mentors and their friends plied us - and themselves - with improbable quantities of Margarita), followed by more drinking, followed by a visit to Bereber, the local nightclub. I gave up due to exhaustion well before Bereber, and came back around midnight, but I found out later that those with more stamina wandered back to campus at around 6am. The definition of a good night out here is when you go to Saturday breakfast before going to bed...

The rest of the weekend was rather quiet (owing in no small part to the hangovers some people were nursing), and also that we needed to hit the ground running first thing on Monday.

The ground training schedule here is actually rather good - each lesson is one hour long, and there's a 15 minute break between each lesson, during which you can go to the crew room, which has tea, coffee and toast available 24/7. This all does a rather good job of breaking up the day and keeping you focused for the whole time. 6 lessons in a day, with an hour in the middle for lunch. Basically you're working 9-5, but with 2 hours off at various intervals in the meantime.

The ground instructors are mostly ex-military types of some description (quite a lot are Flight Engineers, Navigators, etc.), and most of our ones are teaching us their specialist subject. You get some real characters though, such as (without mentioning names) the misanthropic South African who insists that the classroom globe be turned upside down to show the southern hemisphere at the top ("it's the top of the world you know"); and the one who reminds me inescapably (in terms of voice and certain mannerisms) of Mr McKay from Porridge... We also get one instructor assigned as our Course Mentor (as distinct from the Course Mentors...) who keeps half an eye out and helps us settle in.

So that's been my schedule for the past week and a half - 6 lessons per day, 5 days per week, spending an hour or two in the evenings looking over what was covered that day, and then chilling out. Tests come at various times - the Week 9 Progress Tests in all the ground school subjects are the first big milestone, followed by the (internal) Mocks, which happen the week before the real exams on 1st and 2nd June. It sounds like a long way away, but it apparently arrives rather quickly.

These first exams are 6 multiple choice papers, and cover all the material of Phase 1. Phase 2 alternates flying with groundschool, day in, day out, and there are then a further 8 exams. The pass mark is 75% (but most airlines want to see significantly above that).

That about sums up my time here so far. This weekend my course are off to Gibraltar for the day - looking to stock up on essentials at Morrisons, and use the duty-free benefits to the full.
My parents are also coming out here in a couple of weeks, and then again over Easter. Not sure quite when I'll crack and need a weekend at home in Blighty, but I'm told it happens...

Heathrow

The other day I subscribed to the RSS feed of an excellent blog by Flight International's David Learmount. Mr Learmount is Flight's Operations and Safety Editor, and is often called on for comment by the BBC and other publications when there's a flight safety story to report (BA's crash last year being a prime example.)

In particular, I thought I'd draw attention to a recent post of his, which I think has the most sensible and well-reasoned commentary on the airport expansion arguement that I've seen thus far. Enjoy...

Parachutes

My attention was drawn a little while ago to a letter on the ITV Teletext letters page, which suggested that the number of deaths in air accidents might further be reduced if every seat on every airliner had under it not just a life jacket, but also a parachute. "All you have to do is jump out and pull the cord," said the correspondant, "it's easy."

My initial reaction to this was to ask something along the lines of "you're kidding, right?". I thought that, in response to questions I've been asked on the subject, and as a public service, I'd take this opportunity to refute the statement, as follows:

1. Of the airliner accidents that occur every year (not a very big number, and it's dropping further), most of them occur too close to the ground for a parachute to be of any use (i.e. accidents on take-off or landing).


2. Of the accidents that don't occur at low-level (for example, the highly unlikely event of a mid-air collision), there isn't likely to be time to bail-out, and the aircraft (or what remains of it) would most probably be in a spin or some other highly unstable trajectory, with the forces aboard precluding bail-out at all. What are the odds of an incident where a bail-out was the only option with any chance of survival, but the aircraft conveniently was able to hold itself in a steady attitude for several minutes? Somewhat low, I suspect.


3. Ignoring these issues for a moment, let us assume a cruising altitude of, say, 30,000ft. At this level, the useful time of consciousness in the event of a loss of oxygen pressure (caused by, for example, opening a door) is roughly 15 seconds. It is therefore unlikely that a parachutist without oxygen supplies would survive a jump, or even make it out of the door, unless he or she were at the front of the queue. Even then, you're going to get people blocking the exits because they don't want to jump...


4. While on the subject, it's bloody cold at 30,000ft...


5. How long would it take to evacuate an airliner like this? You couldn't use the forward exits, as there's the small problem of being sucked into the engines that are inconveniently mounted under the wings.


6. I've had no parachute training, but I'm given to understand that there's rather more to it than jumping out and pulling the cord. You're asking someone who's never seen a parachute before to work out how to put it on securely and correctly, work out how to deploy the chute whilst hurtling towards the ground from a great height and whilst suffering from oxygen-deprivation and hypothermia, and then make a landing on whatever surface might happen to be present without breaking a leg or two...good game, good game...


7. Let's assume (just for the sake of an arguement) that all of this gets worked out and that everyone makes it out safely. Now what? On a flight from London to New York, for example, quite a substantial amount of time is spent over the North Atlantic, which is, shall we say, a bit chilly. Without survival gear (wetsuit, liferaft, etc.) you're unlikely to last for very long floating in such water, even if young, fit and healthy. Sure, you could drop liferafts from the aircraft at the same time, but the passengers are going to be spread over several miles of sea - how are they going to meet up with each other? And how long could it take for help to arrive? At this point, you may wish to recall the end of the Titanic movie...


8. To quote from The Simpsons:"Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!!!"


9. Then there's the cost: the parachutes themselves cost money, and they have to be repacked regularly; they also weigh a fair bit, and in the flying business, any extra weight equals extra fuel needed, equals increased costs. Hands up anyone willing to pay double the usual airfare in order to have a parachute that you're almost certainly not going to need, and which wouldn't help you anyway?

Anybody want to chip in with any points I've missed? Feel free.

Flying is very safe; it is, in fact, by some considerable margin safer to fly than it is to cross the road. It is said that if you were to fly every day, you'd be involved in a serious accident approximately once every 13,000 years. I quite like those odds, so I'll leave the parachute behind and have a bigger baggage allowance, please...

[the above was originally published by me as a Facebook note in September 2008]

Introduction

Well, this is a new adventure for me. I'd been thinking about starting a blog for some time, but had fairly scattered ideas about what I actually wanted it to do.

A little about myself to start with:

• I'm 22, from Buckinghamshire (England). I graduated in July 2008 from the University of Liverpool with a B.Eng in Aerospace Engineering.
• I've always wanted to be a pilot, and so at the end of this month I'm off to Flight Training Europe in Jerez de La Frontera, Spain, to start a 14-month integrated ATPL (Air Transport Pilots Licence) course.
• I'm a geek. Yes, I admit it. I long ago realised that I was irretrievably geeky, and so I decided just to accept it, embrace it, and get on with life. It's just easier that way.
• I'm a Photography Geek. Anyone who's interested, I own a Canon 40D with a variety of lenses. I'm also a Computer Geek, with a dangerous habit of tinkering with things.
• Why 'Improbably Tall'? Because Jeremy Paxman once called me that. Yes, really.
  

So, why am I blogging, and what am I going to talk about? Well, really I want to do three things with this blog:

1. Use it as a place to ramble generally about whatever happens to pop into my head.
2. Talk about my experience as a trainee pilot.
3. Use this as a photo journal for my time in Spain, and elsewhere.

That's quite enough to introduce me for now, I'll post again when I have something useful to say!