Base Training at Châteaurou, France

Here's an Air France B747-400 (Jumbo) just touching down after doing a 1000ft circuit at Châteaurou (CHR) in central France. We shared the airfield for about 4 hours, nicely co-ordinating our movements so that one was always touching down while the other was downwind in the circuit.

The Air France pilots stopped for lunch and had their First Class meals outside in the lovely sunshine. We had a sandwich, pack of crisps and a piece of fruit in a goodie bag while circuit bashing...

Final Approach onto Runway 22 at CHR. You can just see the Air France Jumbo in the climb-out at the top of the photo. My Sim Partner is nicely flying the approach as witnessed by the PAPIs (the 4 lights to the left of the runway). They basically show 2 x red, and 2 x white lights when we are on the correct glidepath to the runway (3 degrees).

Slide Practice

Here's someone jumping down an A330 slide at Luton. Jumping down this one qualifies us for the slides on the A320 series as well as the higher A330 (which we all hope to progress to fly in due course).

Fire Fighting

Practice fire fighting at Luton Airport Fire Station. There is a specifically designed rig that uses gas flames to simulate aircraft fires. Here you can see one of us attempting to put out a fire in a toilet using a BCF fire extinguisher. The extinguishers are actually full of pressurised water, and the fireman puts out the fire by turning down the gas!

Manuals, Manuals and more Manuals

With a bit of foresight I was sure on the first day at Monarch there would be a lot of documentation given to us. As I am already Type Rated, I basically get two weeks home study after an induction day (to allow the others to do the Airbus Ground School). Therefore I was going to be flying back home with all the goodies given to me!

I planned ahead and travelled very light but with lots of luggage. I had a Samsonite carry-on case (just the right size to get through security), and a large canvas holdall, both empty - waiting for binders!

We were given 4 boxes of binders, plus numerous other piles of paper on the day - regardless of all my planning there was no chance of taking it all. Thanks to one of my new colleagues, Mark, who has about a 1/3rd of my binders in the back of his car, I was able to either take or store all the stuff given to me.

Thanks to easyJet allowing any weight in the cabin, I was able to get about 20kg in my hand luggage, and the other 20kg went in the hold. It wasn't a fun walk from Monarch HQ to the airport Checkin!

I am making good progress through most of the binders now. It's amazing, both what you remember and what you are sure you've never read in your life before! Next Monday is the start of groundschool proper for both me and Mark, who is also type-rated. We continue with about 2 weeks of either lectures or fun stuff like putting out fires, jumping down escape slides, or learning all about escape slides; then move onto the simulator sessions. I'll keep you updated!

Monarch Airlines

It's been a while since I last posted. Fortunately goods news came not long after diving into the holding pool at Monarch (a week to be exact!). I was offered a start date at the beginning of February with a new base of Birmingham.

I am now making frantic arrangements to get accommodation sorted and work my way through the rather complicated reference details required to gain an airside pass for Birmingham Airport. No doubt, it will just take time, rather than unwind at some point. Thanks to all my references for responding quickly to requests for information.

Hopefully my blog will pick-up again when I get going with Monarch in early Feb. There will be all the brush-up of the Airbus systems, the new SOPs to learn, gaining a solid understanding of the Monarch Operations Manual. Should be a lot of fun!

Into the Hold Pool....

Good news, I have successfully been interview by another UK Charter Airline and have just been informed that I am now in their Hold Pool. Typically airlines recruit pilots during the quiet winter season to ensure they have enough ready for the summer season allowing for new routes, retirement, and planned attrition rates. At the interview I was told that they had almost finished all their Summer 07 (S07) recruitment, but still had a few gaps, which I hope I will be filling!

Hopefully it won't be too long before I get a start date, I don't like swimming too much!

Thanks for following my progress

Thanks very much for enjoying my Blog and sending back nice comments (mostly) about the content.

Having just come back from a great 3 week holiday to the USA I am settling down to apply for another flying job. If you have any leads please do let me know!!

I've really enjoyed writing the blog, fortunately for you you'll be glad to know I took hundreds of more photos that were far too boring to see the light of day.

In due course, I will be able to start blogging again as I continue to gain hours until the issuing of my Full ATPL license, by which time, I'll have to move to a new blog! Only another 900 hours to go.....

Cheers

Richard

A lovely rainbow taken from the Newcastle Control Tower.

Visit to Newcastle ATC Tower

Zoe, the other CTC Cadet up in Newcastle lived with an Air Traffic Controller in the tower. Kindly she arranged a visit for both of us. We just missed an exciting go-around just before we got there. Apparently a turbo-prop floated down the runway almost to the end without getting the wheels on to the ground, and reluctantly decided to go around! While we were there nothing too exciting happened.

The tower is due to move to a new, modern and really tall tower much like the new one in Edinburgh (Photo). However, the existing one, is more unmodernised - using a lot of paper and binoculars and even CCTV camera to see around the airport.

We also visited the Radar room, where they control traffic in and out of the Controlled airspace around Newcastle. On take-off the tower hand you over to radar, and vice-versa, we speak to Radar first and when established on approach we move onto the tower frequency.

The end of my adventure with MyTravel

Well that's it then for my experiences with MyTravel out of the Newcastle base. I had an amazing 6 months working with some really fun and interesting people. It was obviously hard (nothing hasn't been during all of my flight training), but hugely rewarding. Hopefully the experience and knowledge I've gained over my time with MyTravel will help me find a good job in due course. I finished with just over 400 hours, and 112 sectors (so 56 return flights), this included 79 take-offs and 83 landings (All flights had a take-off and landing! However, during line training I was offered a few extra take-off & landings by the Captain!). The longest flight was 5:12h blocks-off to blocks-on (i.e. including all ground time moving under our own power), with the shortest being 45 minutes (Manchester to Newcastle ferry flight with a time in the air of 29 minutes!).

It wasn't much fun handing my uniform and pass back in, however, I'm sure it won't be long again before I'm bounding about another airport somewhere else.

Only one more adventure left... the MyTravel end of season Party. Due to be held down in the deepest darkest depths of Newcastle City Centre. No photos will be taken to protect the innocent!

 
And here's one such B757 overtaking us a bit higher up on the return back to the UK!

 
And this was what was above all that cloud, a lovely evening sunset. Taken at about FL80 on our climb out towards the Italian mainland. One of the nice things is getting away from the nasty weather down on the ground. However, the highest I've managed in the Airbus is FL390 (around 39,000ft). The engines haven't got enough grunt to get any higher. The Boeings usually manage a couple of thousand feet higher at FL410 if needed to avoid weather or gain advantage from better winds.

 
We decided to delay our departure due to thunderstorms all around the airfield with lots of lighning, rain and gusty winds. This Monarch A300 called up for departure and left during our wait, he seemed to have no problems leaving...

 
A few of the cabin crew during the turnaround in HER, happily reading trashy magazines. One of the joys during the summer has been getting all the magazines and papers on the turnaround for a sneaky read on the way home. Along with the usual lad mags, I've also managed to learn a thing or two from OK, Hello and the like!

Final Flight with MyTravel

 
Well today is my final flight with MyTravel - down to Heraklion. That was also my very first flight back in late May.

The weather was horrible leaving Newcastle - with the crosswind being just outside my limits. However, more surprising was that the wind, cloud etc... were forecast to be horrible down in HER, unlike my first trip of the season.

Here is the Captain for the flight - Steve, with his flying mascot: Spot the Dog (He's not mad really!)

Here's my view from the Right Hand Seat (RHS) showing some of the complicated instruments and displays available to me on the flight deck. They should probably have 'look but don't touch' stickers on them. Fortunately the Airbus philosophy involves colours, noises and flashing lights to bring any issues to the pilot's attention - handy that! The ECAM window is the lower of the two black panels in the centre (click on ECAM for more info!)

 
Lac d'Annecy, again where we stayed on holiday, on the way back home from Corfu over the French Alps.

 
Here's the highest mountain in Europe, Mont Blanc, with its' surrounding glaciers and other high mountains. According to Wikipedia, Mont Blanc is 15,774ft high, so just under half the height we were flying at. Only a couple of weeks before we'd been hiking around that area on holiday!

 
Back to the grainy photos from 36,000ft! Here's a snap of the French Rivera around the Monaco area. You can clearly see the harbour in Monte-Carlo along with the lower range of mountains that become the Alps later on, which leads me to my next picture....

My PFD and ND somewhere near Brindisi in Southern Italy on the way home. We are climbing through FL310 on our way to FL360 (36,000ft) with a rate of climb of 1600 feet per minute (fpm). On the Navigation Display (ND), you can see that we are tracking about 300 degrees (WNW) with quite a strong headwind. This can be seen by the difference between our True Air Speed (TAS) and Ground Speed (GS) being about 80kts.

and here's the Thomas Cook Airbus taking off....

 
A nice snap of a Thomas Cook Airbus taxiing past us, on it's way to take off towards the South at Corfu.

Sunny Corfu...

 
Oli, my slightly scary Training Captain, in relaxed mode during the turnaround in Corfu. It really is nice to leave a rainy, windy UK and get 20mins standing around in the sun downroute. Oli had just done a lovely visual approach with manual thrust, so I think he was feeling happy that day!

 
This is Kim, the only female Captain I managed to fly with during my time with MyTravel. As you can see Kim is relaxing on the long return flight from the Canaries reading the Sunday papers'. Unlike the male pilots, Kim vetted each attempt at a picture and approved the above for publication! Hopefully she's happy with it.

A nice view of an Alpine lake and valleys somewhere on the border between Germany and Italy on the way to ZTH.

Cardiff seen while heading North to the VOR at Breacon before turning right towards Manchester and home to Newcastle.

Keith or "Stormy" as he's apparently known! I think Keith was the final Captain I had to fly with in Newcastle. Now I have the full set of cards!

Racing down to FUE with a fellow MyTravel A320 2000ft below overtaking us over the Atlantic Ocean.

Off on Holiday!

10 days off on holiday! Here's a snap out of our hotel window in Chamonix of the Glacier that hangs over the town.

Somewhere in the darkness of the cockpit, is Mark, one of the younger Captains in Newcastle. I've only flown with him once, and I have no more flights rostered with him - not sure if it's something I said!

Onboard food

The crew onboard are quite well fed - well I think so! If the flight is early in the morning we get a cooked breakfast (much like the BA breakfast for passengers), plus a box of cereal and milk. Otherwise there's a choice of cooked meals such as: Indonesian Pork, Sweet and Sour Chicken, Chicken Tikka, Veg Curry, Chicken and Roast Potato, Sausage and Mash.... We also get a choice from a selection of sandwiches, crisps and chocolate bars. On top of this... if the flight is long (about 4 hours) we also get a small snack - usually a jacket potato with some kind of sauce. This photo shows the famous spicy lamb on jacket potato. The box above, is full of condiments and includes a pudding (usually Sponge Pudding or Chocolate Pudding).

While outside with my camera, I took a quick picture of the front cargo hold. Basically it's just a big space where the bags are loaded and secured for the flight. Next to it, you can see the conveyor belt for loading and unloading bags...

Getting all nerdy, here's the refuelling panel tucked away on the right-hand side of the aircraft just under the wing. It allows us to control the refueling and defueling (although that's quite rare), and then automatically controls the distribution of fuel between the fuel tanks (2 in each wing - inner and outer, and the centre tank). Here there's 14,100kg of fuel requested, and currently 2,500kg onboard - with it reasonably balanced 1,200 vs 1,300kg.

Nicola, another of the cabin crew, hoping that the wind doesn't change...

Contrails in the sky...

Another contrail, I was obviously feeling artistic when I took these photos!

An aeroplane passing us by 2000ft above with a nice contrail...

MyTravel along with some of the other UK charter airlines, keep Engineers based at some of the popular destinations to service aircraft should anything need attention. MyTravel has it's own Engineer at Corfu who also covers a few of the other Greek islands during a stint down in Greece. I've forgotten his name, but he seems to have a nice life flying between the islands to meet MyTravel flights a few times a week!

While waiting for our missing passenger I took my camera out and took the following video of a nice approach and landing from a Boeing 737....

BMI Airbus on very short finals. I find it quite hard to judge the height, but it should be between 100ft and 50ft flying towards the displaced threshold with the aim of passing over that at 50ft. The threshold is displaced due to the town and a road being a few metres N of the end of the runway surface.

However, he didn't get fully stabilised for the landing and so performed a go-around. Basically the SOPs at MyTravel require that the aircraft is fully configured (gear down & full flaps) with the engine thrust stable (not idle) by 500ft above the airfield in visual conditions and 1000ft in instrument conditions (i.e. in cloud). Obviously the flying Pilot didn't feel that the approach was stable and took the correct action to go-around. The flew a nice visual circuit to a good landing again on the same runway!

This is the Gatwick MyTravel arrival on final approach onto runway 17. We remarked that he looked a little high, but not too much...

Day out to Corfu (CFU)

Today I flew down to Corfu in Greece with Alex (one of the Training Captains in NCL). Given it was the 5th Anniversary of 9/11, I hoped the day would go well. Corfu is well known to be an interesting airport to operate into given step ground all around, the town being at one end of the runway and the lack of an ILS for instrument approaches.

As it was Alex made a nice visual approach to the Northern runway and once on stand we had a lovely view of landing aircraft coming in on runway 17 (the wind shifted direction slightly).

Unfortunately we had a bit of delay as a deaf passenger didn't come to the boarding gate and had to be tracked down in the terminal before we could close up the aircraft and return home. Hence, I managed to get some pictures of landings, a MyTravel go-around and a video of a B737 landing. I hope you enjoy them!

This is Alan, the Manager for the Cabin Crew in Newcastle. He came on our flight to perform a line check on one of the crew (jsimilar to how the flight crew receive line checks every 6 months). He looks very serious filling in the post flight paperwork!

Back in the Newcastle crew room, the cabin crew are performing their post flight duties. They get 1 hr after the plane stops on stand to perform these duties (The flight crew only get 30 minutes - but we have far less to do!). The main task for the cabin crew is to count and bank all the money taken on the flight. Selling duty-free and drinks etc.. are an important way to make extra money for both the working cabin crew (as commission) and the company overall, so they are taught selling techniques and there are lots of promotions and prices to incentivise the crew further!

Sad as I am, I was doing some reading up on the equipment on board the A320. I found a lovely picture of the Auxilary Power Unit (APU) which sits at the back of the aircraft and provides both power and air on the ground. This means we are fairly self-sufficient when arriving at a distant airport, not requiring either external AC power or an air start unit. More details are available at wikipedia.

A Monarch plane (B757 I think) overtaking us, 2000ft below while flying past Athens. The zoom on the camera isn't so good, but the plane was much closer than it appears...

Hopefully this was Athens (again) but from the other side at 36,000ft on the way back home. I've tweaked the colour to try and show more details, so it now looks like a ghastly postcard!

Tony having a quiet moment in the cruise, again on the way to HER.

Andrea and Jane (on the right), two of the delightful crew on my trip to Heraklion (HER) in Crete. They happily posed for this photo on the turnaround down route!

And here is Athens while passing down the spine of Greece on the way to HER. The old airport is in the bottom right hand corner. It was apparently quite a tricky approach through a valley to get in there. The airport is off to the left and looked huge - a handy diversion airfield I think!

New Security Measures

Things were very different when I reported for work today. Reading on the company intranet it was clear that certain things weren't allowed, so the calculator, PDA, sharp pencils, any liquids etc.. were all removed prior to turning up! However, even that wasn't enough - we weren't allowed to even take our flight bags with us. Everything that was allowed had to be in a nice see-through plastic bag. It makes you wonder what I need all the stuff for!

Through security with large queues for the passengers, but everyone seemed fairly relaxed... a full check of my ID, shoes removed and a body search later we were deemed safe to go to the plane. From there on, there were no more dramas, on the inbound flight the passengers were allowed to bring back all the usual items with them in the cabin - much to the amusement of the cabin crew who were severely restricted in what they could have (no deodorant, hairspray, perfume etc...).

Anyway, hopefully it will all calm down soon enough....

During the flight down to Tenerife, I was reading through some of the documentation given to us concerning MyTravel's attempt to improve it's punctuality. On Time Performance (OTP) is the lifeblood of a charter airline as it is a commonly used metric to distinguish between the competitors.

A few years ago, MyTravel apparently had terrible OTP, however, a special working group was set-up to attach greater focus on this part of the airline operation. The result of this was that MyTravel were awarded the Most Improved Charter Airline for the summer 06 season.

Full stats for MyTravel can be found at the following URL: http://flightontime.info/charter/airlines/myt.html
(All the data is collected and published by the CAA).

Given the focus on OTP, this clearly has a knock-on effect on how the flight deck schedules and performs tasks to ensure that we meet and often exceed the required timings to ensure good OTP. However, the overriding concern is always safety, and nothing is unduly rushed to meet the deadlines!

No Captain....

Well, I was all ready at the report time in the crew room.... and no Captain! No naming names, but apparently he had the wrong time for report written down.

That meant it was all up to me to get all the pre-flight checks and briefing done. I hurried down to the aircraft to ensure refueling has started and then performed the usual PF checks and actions prior to the flight. I then did the PNF duties, a quick walkaround the aircraft to look for any damage or visibly obvious areas of concern. Having done all this, with all the passengers boarded, the Captain arrived at the aircraft with 15mins to spare before take-off time. After a quick (but safe!) brief to him, we were in position to request clearance for Tenerife and get underway. Although I was a bit worried at first, I managed to get on with all the actions, and eventually quite enjoyed the extra stress / responsibility that came with it. Not quite Captain material yet, give it another 4000 hours, and who knows!

So this is what is in front of me during the long cruise down to FUE. The top piece of paper is the master copy of the Plog. On here is pretty much all the information we need to plan and monitor the flight. It contains among other things, details on the route (waypoints, FIR boundaries, tracks and distances), the flight plan submitted, routes to diversion airfields, winds on route at lots of altitudes, estimated weights for Take-Off and Landing, and a fuel prediction. We use the Plog to set the flight up when we first arrive at the aircraft and then the PNF (Pilot Non Flying) uses it to monitor and record the progress of the flight as we fly. Generally this means checking track and distances tie-up when traversing a waypoint, monitoring timings against that forecast and ensuring the fuel usage is accurate and balanced across the fuel tanks (this allows us to ensure no fuel leak is occurring).

Underneath the plog is the relevant airways chart (made by Jeppesen for MyTravel) for the route we are flying. The two screens are the PFD (Primary Flying Display) which contains most of the information required to monitor the actual flying attributes of the aircraft, while the ND (Navigation Display) show the route, winds, other aircraft (using TCAS), and weather (using a radar). If used correctly (!), it can also provide useful prompts to help us plan our descent points to minimise fuel usage.

This is one of the NCL based cabin crew, during a quick check to see if we are still alive in the cockpit. It's SOPs for communication to occur about every 30 mins to ensure that things are okay in the flight deck. Fortunately this generally coincides with either a refreshment break or a toilet stop! Claire got all shy as soon as the camera came out!

A quick snap of one of the NCL based training captains, Oliver during the cruise. The photo was taken on the long flight down to Fuerteventura (FUE) in the Canaries (just over 4 hours each way!). Given it's location, it's usual to track to FUE via Spain and Portugal (directly overhead Faro), whereas all the other Canary Islands are usually reached by flying down Tango Routes. More of them to come when I can come up with a suitable description!