MAN to RMI (Rimini)

Off to Manchester to start a quick tour of a few different bases. The basic idea is to fly with some different Training Captains, and get used to some of the different airfields here in the UK. Newcastle is quite a small base, and doesn't really have much in the way of STARs (routes for arriving at airports) or SIDs (routes for departures). Plus it only has one long parallel taxyway so knowing where to taxy isn't too hard.

So off to MAN, where things are a bit different. Lots of aircraft, taxying routes, even different radio frequencies (x3) for starting engines, pushing back and taxying!

Anyway, I got to be PF (Pilot Flying) for the outbound sector and flew a nice manual departure up to about FL80 (8,000ft) using one of the departure SIDs to the south. The flight to Rimini was quite short (2h30) compared to most of flights, so this meant there wasn't too much time for questions from the Training Captain.

A nice ILS approach and a quick turnaround had us returning to Manchester nice and early. I was given the approach and landing, for extra practice, and managed a nice touchdown on R24R in MAN.

It was a nice days' flying, and has shown me that I can operate into the busier airports in the UK without too many problems!

Back to CTC...

After a couple of rather hard landings over the last couple of weeks, it was suggested that given my level of experience I wasn't getting enough landing practice to ensure consistent landings! I was actually quite pleased to get the offer of a couple of hours in the simulator as I was starting to see issues with the way I was landing - some days I had great landings, and others I kind of bashed it into the ground.

Back at CTC, I flew 2 hours in the full motion sim. We looked at different suggested techniques for introducing the flare. The main aim of a large jet landing is not to make it too smooth (that would use up lots of runway while you slowly lowered yourself to the tarmac), rather, it should be noticeable that a landing has been made! We started by not flaring at all, seeing the aircrafts' response, moving up to total greaser landings (really smooth, but getting ever closer to the end of the runway). Then we started to look somewhere in the middle, and refined a basic technique that could be built on given different weather conditions or the nature of the approach.

I came out of the sim well refreshed on the technique ready to ensure I performed some good landing in the coming sectors....

NCL to ALC

Lots of interesting weather on the way to Alicante today. Here's a picture of one of the many towering Cumulonimbus (Cb) clouds we encountered over central France (around Lyon and Toulouse). We were flying at FL380 and had to change course to avoid flying through the cloud. This basically means asking ATC for a heading change to come off the airway we were flying on, so that we could fly around the weather. By making the decision early you can limit the extra track miles needed and limit the heading change needed. We did hear one aircraft requesting a 60 degree offset, by 15-20 degrees was more common. Given the weather, I had lots of practice in using the onboard Weather Radar to identify upcoming clouds from about 100nm away.

A quick snap of one of the Training Captains that I am flying with at the moment. Alex used to fly for the RAF and alongside all the training we've been doing has been keeping me amused with interesting stories from his RAF days!

Here's the Isle of Wight taken just as we passed over Portsmouth on our way down across the Channel to central France and the predicted Cb cloud.

Newcastle to Zakinthos

Here is a lovely view of Venice taken from FL350 (35,000ft) on my way to Zakinthos airport (ZTH) in Greece. The Captain was Pilot Flying (PF) for the leg so I was able to hop out of my seat to try and get a good picture. Surprisingly this was almost the only part of the flight where the ground wasn't totally covered by cloud!