Week 58: PPL Flight School Week 27

Tuesday
Yet another flight got cancelled on Monday due to the crap weather, it's getting really really frustrating. Good thing that the next day I got planned for a 2hr sim session. Recalling my mistakes in my previous sim, I refined my concept of sector entry and got accustomed to holding as well as landing in ILS.

VOR interception and tracking, plus RNAV approach and keying in the flight plan in the G1000 system. I learned a lot from this lesson on how to fly a true IF flight. It was a good 2hr spent in the sim.

Wednesday
Scheduled for two sim session each lasting for an hour. This time round, I did everything on my own, from flight planning to sector entry to precision approach. Totally getting the hang of it, my instructor didn't even have to teach or correct me anything. It was a good feeling after the session ended.

Thursday
I've never flown so much sims since I came here, and today I'm once again scheduled for another 2hr sim. Running out of things to learn, I requested for a full dry run of an IF flight, along with radio calls simulated by my instructor. It wasn't easy, having to learn a new form of communication with the ATC after being in CTAF aerodromes all these while.

I fumbled, just like how I did when I first tried the radio calls on CTAF. But it wasn't that bad, and it was a good start. I have a clearer picture of how an IF flight will be flown, just waiting for the scheduler to plan me for my flight.

Friday
After a long seven days of not touching the aircraft, I was finally planned for a flight; a very special one. Flight time was 1915hrs, that means no more sunlight. My syllabus included 6hrs of night flight consisting of 2hrs of circuit and 4hrs of instrument navigation flight.

The night was really cold and the winds were rather crazy. There was a cold front approaching and I was so worried that the flight won't go ahead again. Luckily, the weather held up and I took off an hour earlier. It was very hard to adapt to night conditions with such limited light. It was close to pitch dark outside and I had to rely on my instruments as well as the limited lighting on the runway to fly the circuit properly.

The lightings were in such a way that only the perimeters of the runway is lighted. There is no centre line lightings, and that makes it harder to aim for the centre line. I was instead lining up on approach to the papi lights by intuition. The first landing was demonstrated by my instructor, and I was flabbergasted at how high it looked when the flaring was being commenced.

Night flying is definitely full of different sort of challenges. The following circuits were flown by me with some crappy landings due to a combination of rustiness, inexperience as well as the gusty conditions of 33kts headwind. The city lights though limited, were beautiful enough for me to admire while flying.

The amount of focus needed is way more than during the day. It felt great no doubt, with the peace and stars, and I can't wait to fly the remaining 4hrs of night flying.

View of city from 4000ft

It was a cold gusty 10'C night

Definitely wasn't easy in those gusty winds

It was a good week considering the amount of sim hours clocked. That's one less thing to worry about when nearing the end of my 86hrs syllabus flight time. However, I'm still having a massive 19hrs of flight time remaining. Remaining sim time has been greatly reduced to 12.5hrs.