Week 72: Advanced commences

After a nice relaxed week advanced is under way, with the Airbus showing us all the wonderful things that can go wrong! Before we got going i'd enjoyed a week off, so whilst being at home managed a trip to the Imperial War Museum in London, somewhere i'd not been for easily 15 years! As usual the aeroplanes on display grabbed my attention, but pretty much everything took my interest. At the moment there is a Holocaust Exhibition which was really incredible; the fact that the human race were capable of such atrocities is unbelievable, but the tone of the exhibition, level of knowledge I left with, and the many learning aids included left me well-informed, but saddened. Amazingly we consider this to be an isolated occurrence, but history has proven that such nasty acts have been repeated and probably will again.

Coming back to Southampton we had another day in the classroom in preparation for the advanced phase of training, looking into how the operation would change and the areas of focus during the flights. Advanced only consists of 14 flights in which we have many failures to cover, so each flight really needs to count. We also have items that need to be 'signed off' to confirm that we have reached an acceptable standard of proficiency ahead of our Licence Skills test (LST), proving that opportunities to prepare are gently reducing! The focus of our first flight was manual handling, looking at the dreaded circling approaches, non-precision approaches, landings, and take offs. We also had a chance to look at a rather scary manoeuvre, the 'TOGA 10'. It is a low level recovery manoeuvre, normally following a bounce on landing, where the pilot selects go-around power, pitches the nose to 10 degrees and waits. This is because prior to the bounce the power would have been reduced to idle (zero), so the engines will take time to spool up to full power, and when they do the nose may pitch up violently which could lead to a tail-strike. By utilising TOGA 10 the aircraft should stay off the runway, and once it gently begins to climb the normal go-around procedure can be put into action.

Hopefully next weeks post is a bit more interesting as things start to go seriously wrong. Thank God it's all in a simulator!