In the last few weeks we’ve really experienced just how good summer in Ireland can be. It has arrived at the perfect time to be moving on to the next section of our flying which involves a fair amount of navigation flights and getting in a lot of solo flight time. As we just missed out on this part of flying before starting into ATPL’s I was excited to experience navigation flights for the first time. For me, the best part about navigation flights is that it involves flying around much larger and further afield parts of the country. Up until now the majority of our flight time has been spent in the vicinity of Cork airport, never going much further away from the airport than maybe 20nm or so. Navigations really open up a lot of new opportunities in terms of areas you can fly to.
So far I have been able to get to various parts of the country from Waterford across to Mizen Head as well as travelling up the west coast to Shannon and the Cliffs of Moher, some fairly spectacular spots to fly over. On a beautiful day there really is no other country like Ireland, I challenge any other country to look better from the air.
Not that these flights are about sight seeing, there is also a fantastic challenge of flying in to new airports and new areas. Having little flying experience before beginning the course, essentially all of my flight time has been in Cork airport. Now flying into other busy international airports like Shannon opens up a new chance to push your skills and learn new ones. Cork is challenging in it’s own right with a lot of commercial traffic daily, but it is quite an experience to be flying in to Shannon in your little Cessna and you look out the window and see you’re competing for airspace with an Airbus A330.
It’s definitely my favourite part of training so far. I’m enjoying nav flights so much because each one is different. It encompasses the three core principles of flying, aviate, navigate, communicate. So far in training, flying the plane has been the key factor and something which we are all comfortable with by now. During a nav we have more tasks competing for brain capacity. You are responsible for your own situational awareness, communicating with various different air traffic facilities, being very aware of the weather as well as completing your own navigation using quite traditional methods. Anyone who has used a CRP at some stage may have been as surprised as me that those pieces of plastic can quite accurately get you from A-B.
I’m glad to report that so far I’ve always managed to find ‘B’, which is really what you want in a navigation flight.