Coming to the end of my visual navigation flights, with only a few hours left to complete, it has definitely been my favorite part of the course so far. I had heard this from a number of students before starting into it and I definitely agree, it gives a great sense of freedom being in the plane on your own for a few hours. It gives you a fantastic opportunity to explore the country from the sky. I’ve seen so many beautiful parts of Ireland from a perspective that not many have experienced before. It makes you appreciate it a whole lot more. It’s truly amazing to fly along the “Wild Atlantic Way” and experience the beautiful coastline of Ireland from the air.
That being said, I am excited to be starting into the instrument flying and what is more the business end of the course with flight tests beginning to loom on the horizon. Getting into instrument flying gives much more of a sense of what my future flying career will look and feel like. Until now my flying has been almost completely visually based, i.e. looking out the window and looking at a map, thankfully pilots flying the likes of 737’s and A380’s don’t use this method. Instrument flying allows for a much greater degree of precision, accuracy and capability in terms of the type of flying you can undertake. It goes without saying that the systems and instruments on our training aircraft are more basic than what you find in airliners but they all have advanced GPS systems and we train on both glass cockpit G1000 and conventional iron dial instrumentation to develop our instrument flying scan to a high standard. It is the practice, the mindset, the use of instrument procedures and methods that are the key learnings which can then later be applied in more advanced systems.
So far I have seen that it takes a lot of practice to become accustomed to the flight instruments, you are constantly scanning several displays to maintain the aircraft as it should be. If you allow any instrument to go unchecked you can quickly find yourself in a position you shouldn’t be or even potentially losing control of the aircraft. Practice makes perfect though and I’m told that flying on instruments becomes second nature in no time at all. It’s also fantastic to be experiencing procedures that I’ve heard of all my life, like an ILS (instrument landing system) approach. To actually fly the approach myself using the instruments alone gave me a real buzz the first time I completed it. I’m in no way comparing my landing of a little Cessna to landing a commercial jet on an ILS system but in principle it’s the same and AFTA teach us using the same airline flight path profiles that we will use in our future careers so that we are accustomed to standard airline operating procedures (SOP’s). We all have to start somewhere.