I’ve been using the following two documents provided by Industry Canada as a study guide for the Radiotelephone License:

- Study Guide for the Radio telephone Operator’s Restircted Certificate (Aeronautical)

- Guide for Examiners Conducting Examinations for the Radiotelephone Operator’s Restricted Certificate (Aeronautical)

The examiner guide is good, because it contains some sample questions you could expect them to ask.

I’ve been spending the past hour working on my Computer Systems assignment (its a METAR, TAF, and FD decoder). I’m at the point now where I have to convert the weather codes into human readable format. Ie, make it so that “SN” is displayed as “Snow”.

Most of the codes are straight forward:

SN = Snow

RA = Rain

VA = Volcanic Ash

DZ = Drizzle

There are some that, at first, didn’t make any sense:

GR = Hail

BR = Mist

FU = Smoke

PO = Dust

I thought to my self.. Hail, in French is: grêle. So I looked …

Today was a textbook day for illusions! I was afraid that it would be weeks before I could experience them first hand. I was able to book this flight a little last minute on Friday night.

I was going to experience two illusions today. These illusions are created by drift. It’s pretty simple really:

Ground speed. If you have a strong headwind or tail wind, it “looks” like you are going faster (tailwind) or slower (headwind) than you actually are. If you look solely at your airspeed, this is true. However, your …

This is an update to a post I made earlier in the week.

The flight on Saturday was good. We finished up stalls and spirals. Let me tell you, spirals are much more easier on the stomach than the spins are. One of my classmates took a video of her spin lesson – I asked for a copy so that I can post it here. Just so you guys can get an idea of what it looks like from inside the aircraft.

The weather wasn’t the best. At 5000′ we were doing …

Crew Resource Management. It’s a concept that is relatively new to the aviation scene. The idea behind CRM is that work flows and communication in the cockpit and with the rest of the crew is optimized.

A lot of aviation accidents in the past were due to a lack of CRM. The most famous would probably have to be the Tenerife Disaster, the most fatal aircraft accident in history (583 died) (dont say September 11 attacks trumps this, it wasn’t an accident!).

Many factors were at play. However the captains refusal to …