Week 44: VFR over and back into the books

This week I met a significant milestone with my training, having completed my VFR competency assurance flight. As I mentioned many moons ago, VFR means 'visual flight rules', and is in essence flying the aircraft by outside reference using the horizon and depth perception to navigate the aircraft. The C/A wasn't perfect and I did have a few brainfarts, but thankfully I passed and can move on to IFR.

This is about to take on a new level of importance

Modern airline operations are rarely conducted under VFR conditions, and the C/A signifies the start of the more challenging element of the course, Instrument flight rules (IFR). During the visual phrase the required weather minima were massively restrictive, with both cloud and visibilty regularly halting flights as their values were less than the amount the law requires. However, with instrument flight the aircraft is flown by reference to information on the panel, information which commonly receives input from ground based facilities to aid navigation, so the flights can happen in significantly worse conditions. The Cessna's Garmin panel now takes on a new level of importance, and to really force us to use only the instruments we'll be using a hood which effectively blocks our view out the window. Rather fetching...

In preparation for our first instrument flight, the MPL course have 8 sessions conducted in the Twinstar simulator. Chances are i'll only get through the first few this week which focus on holding, so after a briefing on Saturday i've been back at my desk attempting to get some of the information to stick! We've all been on board an aircraft when the pilot happily informs us there'll be 10 minutes (or more) of holding before conducting an approach to the destination. This hold can be for a variety of reasons, from insufficient capacity at the airfield to bad weather on the approach, or even equipment failure in either the aircraft or on the airfield. In essence the hold is there to delay the onward movement of the flight, so it's important we can do it properly as we'll pretty much have to do it on every flight! 

The hold itself is a racetrack pattern, with two straight legs and two 180degree turns. Each of these parts should take one minute, so simple maths says one hold takes 4 minutes. What we will learn in the sim is how to get into the hold, what headings to fly within the hold to remain within it's protected airspace, and how to manage the aircraft in preparation for an instrument approach. What we do here in New Zealand is really an introduction to instrument flight as we will really get into it in the Airbus back in Southampton, but for the moment there's lots to learn and i'm quite excited to learn a completely new skill. Hopefully i'm not awful!

 Pictorial view (Plate) of Hamilton hold in the centre 

with associated instrument approach