Today was a historical day. I flew again, after a looooong gap of 70 days. THAT IS LONG. It had taken me only 30 days to do a solo flight. I have plenty of excuses of why it took me so much time to do my written exam, and why I didn't fly and study simultaneously, but that's now the past. I now have a new instructor, Alistair Beaton. He got me brushed up on the procedures, and we were up for more than an hour. Overall I still know how to fly, but I've somehow forgotten how to land! Yup. So my solo priviledges have been revoked for the time being, or at least until I can re-learn and demostrate that I can land safely. The precautionary landing and emergency landing procedures need some work. I need to go through all the procedures and the maps because I was slow at responding to the situations, but most part of the flight, including airwork was smooth and well done.
For the uninformed, here's a primer of my training, with some minimalistic details.
The training will broadly comprise of the following:
- PPL - Private Pilot License - I'm half way through this.
- CPL - Commercial Pilot License - This is license that I need.
- Multi-IFR Rating
Multi-IFR means:
- Multi-Engine Rating - You learn to and get a license to fly multi-engine airplane. Remember that most of the PPL and CPL training is done on a single-engine airplane. Multi-engine means 2 or more engines - the types you'll see on the bigger planes - mostly 1 on each wing or 2 on each wing.
- IFR - or Instrument Rating. This license allows one to fly in below visual conditions and through clouds. Without this, you cannot fly if the clouds are too low or the visibility is too less. The PPL is done completely in VFR conditions - Visual Flight Rules - means that the clouds are at least a certain height and visibility is at least a certain distance.
Most students combine the Multi-Engine Rating and IFR into a single exercise, doing the IFR on a Multi-Engine airplane. This is exactly what the airlines look for. Also, the corporate planes are of the similar kind, so IFR experience on a Multi-Engine definitely gets you a notch up.
There are separate bunch of instructors for VFR and IFR. Since my first instructor moved from VFR to IFR instructions, I had to find a new VFR instructor, and I'm glad to be under Alistair.
The PPL is 45 hours of flying, but most students complete in 60 hours. The CPL+Multi+IFR has some minimums, but the idea is to pull up the total flying hours to 200. This would of course be flight time, and not air time. Air-time is the time between lift-off and landing, and flight-time is the time from engine-start to engine-stop. There is some time lost between the engine-start and lift-off, and between the touch-down and engine-off - remember that you have to do some checks before takeoff and "taxi" the plane to the runway before you can takeoff, and the similar procedures when you land.
Note: If you liked this article, or want more details, or you find some mistakes above, please do email me.
Cheers
Mayur Poddar
