Flying yesterday went spectacularly, especially for a three hour lesson! My FI and I did a ground brief for an hour on diversions. We decided to see if there was a plane available for 7pm – there was! So we headed up to practice what we talked about. It was a beautiful evening. Smooth as…
I came across some videos on YouTube of various WestJet Goodies. Someone put a montage together with U2’s Beautiful Day of various goings on at WestJet. A more “exciting” video is one of when WestJet retired their 737-200 earlier this year. The video shows the plane doing some low passes at Calgary International and getting…
I’m quickly becoming a wiz on the E6B thanks to my Navigation classes. Yesterday’s class was fun, dry, but fun. We spent the past two classes planning a cross country trip: CYKZ->YEE->CYQA->CNF4->CYKZ Without going into too much detail, we planned one leg (YKZ->YEE) in class. Worked out how much fuel we’d need, headings to fly,…
Everything went good with my lesson yesterday. I’m now cleared to practice on my own in the local training areas. My FI says im going to need about 5 hours of solo practice. My steep turns are horrible, atrocious in fact. So on Thursday (if the weather holds up) I”m going to dedicate most of…
Now this is cool. I’ve been looking for a tool to display Canadian airspace in real time. Some of the google earth kml files that users have produced have been of poor quality. Not anymore. Using a free database of aeronautical information, Global Imaging have created a kml file that accesses this DB in real…
My lesson on Sunday went well. Except for the take off. Me: What kind of take off today? FI: Lets to a short field take off *taxi into position, start the take off roll and rotate* FI: what happened to the ground effect part Me: whoops! I forgot Yeah, so I did a “short field…
Yesterday’s lesson went well. I was more prepared with the forced landings. Armchair flying really does help! Today we are going to be doing precautionary landings. Right now (at 9am) the visibility is already at 9SM. The TAF is forecasting 5SM by the time I’m supposed to fly. If my flight is canceled, this will…
The past two lessons have all been about forced approaches. I’m starting to feel challenged again! To answer my own question in my previous post, we don’t learn the 360° landing forced approach until the CPL phase of training. The hardest thing I’ve found is judging your touchdown point on a grass field. There really…
I read in the paper the other day that a popular landmark for both nautical and aeronautical navigation will be no more on Monday. “The Four Sisters” is an old electricity generating plant that has four big smoke stacks. The Toronto VTA shows the “four stacks” as a valid VFR reporting point. It’s been used…
I found out today that a fellow co-worker (well a Manager) at work got his private pilot license 20 years ago – he hasn’t flown in quite a while though. I reviewed precautionary landings and forced landings tonight for my lesson on Saturday. For a forced landing the Flight Training Manual suggests two ways of…