I tend not to update my blog too often at the moment but this is going to change very soon, indeed I'll be in the States in less than 3 weeks and from then onwards I'll be flying pretty much everyday, doing long distance and interesting flights over places of the likes of Grand Canyon, Catalina Island and the Californian landscapes, thus except loads of updates and pictures.Last week, I was with the fellow BCFT students in Gatwick (London) taking my last 7 exams of the ATPL ground course.
As far as my estimation goes, I reckon it went quite well, I'll get the results in about 2 weeks time.
We had Aircraft General Knowledge on tuesday. This deals with aircraft electrics (that will make much more sense during the type rating), aircraft systems (pressurisation, structures and materials, valves and actuators, fuel system, undercarriage, ...) and engines (both piston and turbine). Quite a lot of stuff to know in one subject. Instruments was on wednesday, probably the most interesting subject as this is where we learn all about gauges, digital instruments and needles, EFIS, FMS, flight director, autothrottle, FADEC, EICAS, etc ...
Then came General Navigation followed by Radio Navigation on thursday. GenNav is considered as being one of the hardest subject as it involves lots of maths (simple maths still). It just depends on your background but it doesn't require anything beyond high school. Basically, that's where we learn the calculation of distances along rhumb lines and great circles, grid navigation, IRS, a bit of flight planning, time zones issue and other theoretical stuff. RadioNav, despite a similar name is completely different subject. That's all to do with navigation aids such as VORs, ILS, NDBs, GPS, primary and secondary radars, Radalt and their principle of operation ... It comes with a lot of figures to remember (radio range and wave lenghs, ..), types of errors encountered, etc.
And finally, friday was left with the remaining three exams: Air Law, VFR and IFR communications. The last two were quite basic, however Air Law was tough to learn as this doesn't always make much sense to us since this is the theory which we haven't experienced in the air yet. Things like aircraft seperation depending on aircraft weight (so many different cases I stopped counting), airspace classes, holding patterns, ICAO organisation and world conventions, ... and the list goes on.
So this is it, ground school is finished and we're moving onto the next phases.
I wouldn't have thought the six months would fly so fast! I flew back to France on monday, hence the flight deck pictures. I did two flights yesterday on the Cessna 150 I learnt to fly on. This brings some old memories since my first flights on her were 8 years ago! Did I mention time flies by?
