Sunday, March 29, 2015

Week 92: A320 Type Rating Week 31

After the confidence booster session I had in the full motion sim last week, I was raring to have another go at it this week. This time it will be heck lot more challenging with poorer weather conditions.

ATIS: 15kts crosswind, night, 5000m, heavy rain, wet runway with good braking action

Just like last week, we had to do visual circuits from take-off with full stop, and a circle to land from a Non-precision approach. Visual circuits were flown at two different altitudes; twice for each level, mainly 1500ft and 1000ft AGL.

1500ft circuit was without much issue as the thrust reduction and acceleration altitudes are at 800ft and 1200ft respectively just like last week. The 1000ft circuit is a little different with both of them at 800ft AGL, so the reaction gotta be real quick to anticipate thrust and flying attitude change before hitting 1000ft AGL to fly level.

Since the weather wasn't really that great plus it was at night, I had to use a lot of my ND to maintain awareness. The base turn was the most challenging aspect as getting visual with the papi and runway lights really required a lot of visual power. Sometimes, I'm able to see it but my PM can't and vice-versa. The trouble with spotting the runway late, resulted in a pretty messy final approach, but my landings were safe and close to centreline even with that strong crosswind.

The same goes for circling to land, but this time with a localiser only approach to simulate NPA. And also going-around during downwind leg, when you really gotta be aware of where you are and where you are flying next for the missed approach procedure. It is all about situation awareness and be prepared for a go-around when unstable or lost visual. So far, so good.




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Had a meeting with the airline management this week and is glad that they're able to absorb us into the fleet but with some sacrifices on our side for a period of time. At the end of the day, I'm just relieved that I have such a caring company who think about our welfare and try their best to improve our situation, which I deeply appreciate.

When I embarked on this journey some 29 months ago, I've been yearning for the day I can truly call myself a professional aviator. The journey has thus far been long and arduous, braking and accelerating on numerous occasions. But waiting is a norm in this industry, so I can't really complain but to grind it out and make sure I train proficiently to display the level of professionalism expected of me day in day out. Expected completion is within the next three months, a final sprint before a new chapter begins.


This week also witnessed the passing of Singapore's founding father, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. He is a great loss to Singapore but his legacy will live. Singapore Airlines was set up by him and he has a vision for Changi Airport which we are witnessing today, a world class aviation hub. He can be said to be the pioneer of Singapore aviation. 

Thank you for all that you've done for us since 1955 when you stepped into parliament. Had Singapore had a different prime minister then, things would have been very different. You spirit will always live in us. May you rest in peace.



SIA pilots bidding him final farewell



Air Canada flight makes abrupt landing in Halifax




An Air Canada plane came off the runway after landing at Halifax Stanfield International Airport in Nova Scotia early Sunday, the airline reported, as passengers and crew were checked for injuries.

The airline said on Twitter that flight AC624 from Toronto "exited runway upon landing at Halifax. All passengers have deplaned, going to terminal."

Air Canada did not say what caused the aircraft to leave the runway after landing, but heavy snow was forecast in the eastern Canadian city. Environment Canada issued a snowfall alert and warned of low visibility.

Halifax Airport said 23 people were taken to hospital for observation and treatment of minor injuries.

There were 132 passengers and five crew aboard the flight, which departed from Toronto at 9:05 pm (0105 GMT Sunday).

Flightaware.com said the aircraft was an Airbus A320.

Several counties in the the eastern coastal province of Nova Scotia were affected by Saturday's winter weather alert.

SOURCE


Crash pilot was psychiatric patient, planned big gesture - paper


The co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing an airliner, killing 150 people, had told his girlfriend he was planning a spectacular gesture so "everyone will know my name", a German daily said on Saturday.

The Bild newspaper published an interview with a woman who said she had had a relationship in 2014 with Andreas Lubitz, the man French prosecutors believe locked himself alone in the cockpit of the Germanwings Airbus on Tuesday and steered it into the French Alps, killing all on board.

"When I heard about the crash, I remembered a sentence... he said: 'One day I'll do something that will change the system, and then everyone will know my name and remember it'," said the woman, a flight attendant the paper gave the pseudonym of Maria W.

"I didn't know what he meant by that at the time, but now it's obvious," she said. "He did it because he realised that, due to his health problems, his big dream of working at Lufthansa, of a having job as a pilot, and as a pilot on long-distance flights, was nearly impossible."

"He never talked much about his illness, only that he was in psychiatric treatment," she told the paper, adding they finally broke up because she was afraid of him.

"He would suddenly freak out in conversations and yell at me," she recalled. "At night he would wake up screaming 'we are crashing' because he had nightmares. He could be good at hiding what was really going on inside him."

The woman also told Bild: "We always talked a lot about work and then he became a different person. He became upset about the conditions we worked under: too little money, fear of losing the contract, too much pressure."

A Lufthansa spokesman declined to comment. The company and its low-cost subsidiary Germanwings took out full-page advertisements in major German and French newspapers on Saturday, expressing "deepest mourning".

Lufthansa and Germanwings offered condolences to the friends and families of the passengers and crew and thanked the thousands of people in France, Spain and Germany it said had helped since the crash.

German officials said there would be a ceremony on April 17 in Cologne Cathedral attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and senior officials from other countries including France and Spain.

Also on Saturday, relatives of the Germanwings captain whom Lubitz locked out of the cockpit before the crash visited a memorial to the victims in the French Alps, while a special mass was held at the small cathedral in nearby Digne-les-Bains.

"OVERSTRESS SYMPTOMS"
German authorities said on Friday they had found torn-up sick notes showing the co-pilot had been suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy. Germanwings, the budget airline of the flag carrier Lufthansa, has said he did not submit a sick note at the time.

German newspaper Welt am Sonntag quoted a senior investigator as saying the 27-year-old "was treated by several neurologists and psychiatrists", adding that a number of medications had been found in his Duesseldorf apartment.

Police also discovered personal notes that showed Lubitz suffered from "severe subjective overstress symptoms", he added.

The New York Times on Saturday quoted officials as saying Lubitz had also sought treatment for vision problems that may have jeopardized his ability to work as a pilot.

German state prosecutors and police spokesmen declined to comment on the media reports, adding there would be no official statements on the case before Monday.

Investigators have retrieved cockpit voice recordings from one of the plane's "black boxes", which they say show that Lubitz locked himself alone in the cockpit, as his fellow pilot desperately tried to break in, and caused the airliner to crash.

A chief French investigator said on Saturday it was too early to rule out other explanations for the crash.

"There is obviously a scenario that is well known to the media and which we are focusing on," French investigator General Jean-Pierre Michel told French media.

"But we have no right today to rule out other hypotheses, including the mechanical hypotheses, as long as we haven't proved that the plane had no (mechanical) problem," he added, pointing out that a second black box containing flight data had not been found yet.

(Additional reporting by Georg Merziger, Maria Sheahan, Tom Käckenhoff, Ingrid Melander and Reuters television; Editing by Andrew Roche and Raissa Kasolowsky)

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

150 killed in plane crash in French Alps




A plane operated by the budget carrier of Germany's Lufthansa crashed in a remote area of the French Alps on Tuesday (Mar 24), killing all 150 on board in France's worst aviation disaster in decades.

With the cause of the accident a complete mystery, authorities recovered a black box from the Airbus A320 at the crash site, where rescue efforts were being hampered by the mountainous terrain.

Local MP Christophe Castaner, who flew over the crash site, said on Twitter: "Horrendous images in this mountain scenery. Nothing is left but debris and bodies. Flying over the crash site with the interior minister - a horror - the plane is totally destroyed."

Video images from a government helicopter flying near the area showed a desolate snow-flecked moonscape, with steep ravines covered in scree.

Budget airline Germanwings said the Airbus plunged for eight minutes but French aviation officials said the plane had made no distress call before crashing near the ski resort of Barcelonnette.

"A black box was found and will be delivered to investigators," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said. Weather did not appear to be a factor in the crash, with conditions "calm" at the time.

"There was no cloud at the plane's cruising altitude", winds were "light to moderate" and there was no turbulence that could have contributed to the crash, French weather officials said.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls said there were no survivors, adding that the authorities "can't rule out any theory" on the cause of the disaster.

The plane, carrying 144 mainly Spanish and German passengers - including two babies - and six crew, was travelling from Barcelona to the western German city of Duesseldorf when it came down.

German authorities said 16 German teenagers on a school trip were on board the doomed plane, as tearful relatives rushed to the airports in the two cities anxiously seeking information about their loved ones.

'IT IS A TRAGEDY'

It was the first fatal accident in the history of Germanwings, and the deadliest on the French mainland since 1974 when a Turkish Airlines crashed, killing 346 people.

French President Francois Hollande said he would meet his German and Spanish counterparts at the crash site on Wednesday. "It is a tragedy, a new airline tragedy. We will determine what caused the crash," Hollande said.

The dead included Germans, Spaniards and "probably" Turks, Hollande said, while Belgium said at least one of its nationals was on board.

Germanwings said 67 Germans were believed to have been on board while Spain said 45 people with Spanish sounding names were on the flight.

A crisis cell has been set up in the area between Barcelonnette and Digne-les-Bains along with an emergency flight control centre to coordinate the chopper flights to the crash site.

Authorities commandeered a large meadow with dozens of helicopters taking off to head to the crash site. Valls said one helicopter had been able to touch down at the site of the accident but locals described the difficult terrain that awaited rescue teams.

"Ground access is horrible, I know the Estrop massif, it's a very high mountainous area, very steep and it's terrible to get there except from the air during winter," local resident Francoise Pie said. A witness who was skiing near the crash site told French television he "heard an enormous noise" around the time of the disaster.

'DARK DAY'

The plane belonged to Germanwings, a low-cost affiliate of German flag carrier Lufthansa based in Cologne. "We've never had a total loss of aircraft in the company's history until now," a company spokeswoman told AFP. Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr described it as a "dark day."

A spokesman for Airbus, the European aerospace giant, did not give any information about possible causes but said the company had opened a "crisis cell" and was sending experts to the scene.

French civil aviation authorities said they lost contact with the plane and declared it was in distress at 10.30am (5.30pm Singapore time). However, the aircraft's crew did not send a distress signal, civil aviation authorities told AFP.

"The crew did not send a Mayday. It was air traffic control that decided to declare the plane was in distress because there was no contact with the crew of the plane," the source said.

In 1981, a plane crashed on the French island of Corsica with 180 people on board.

In July 2000, an Air France Concorde crashed shortly after take-off from Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport en route for New York, leaving 113 people, leaving mainly Germans dead and eventually leading to the supersonic airliner being taken out of service.

The world's worst air disasters remain the Mar 27, 1977, collision of two Boeing 747s on the runway at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people, and the Aug 12, 1985 crash into a mountainside of a Boeing 747 belonging to Japan Airlines, killing 520 people.



Friday, March 20, 2015

Week 91: A320 Type Rating Week 30

This week marks the start of Phase 3 training. From now onwards, I will only fly in the full motion simulator. I was a little worried about motion sickness the night before my training. I'm not exactly a fan of roller coaster either.

As a familiarization training, it was only a short 2-hour session with each cadet flying for one hour. Lesson objective was to fly two visual circuit pattern, two touch&go and two straight-in 6miles final approach.

It was my first try at circuit flying on the A320, and it's quite differently flown as compared to the C172 type of circuit.

Thrust reduction: 800ft 
Acceleration altitude: 1200ft 
Circuit height: 1600ft 

Heights are based on Changi Runway 02C with elevation of 22ft.

Circuit was flown fully with raw data, without FD, A/THR, AP and ILS. Everything happens very quickly in the circuit. Flex/MCT for take-off, gear up with positive climb, flying attitude at 15degrees nose up, pull back to CLIMB thrust at 800ft which is very easily attained, thus the probability of missing it is quite high. Hitting 1200ft lower nose to 10degrees for acceleration and cleaning up of flaps. Circuit speed shall be flown at Green Dot, which is roughly 200kts.

Upon leveling off at 1600ft, make a 25degrees right bank towards downwind track. Call for After Take-off/Climb Checklist once all flaps/gear/spoilers are retracted. Once done, activate APPROACH PHASE in the FMGC and call for Approach Checklist. Go-around altitude will be set on the FCU at downwind leg, along with Flaps 1 and setting S-speed.

Once abeam runway threshold, start chrono. For every 100ft AGL, the downwind leg will have to be flown for an added 3seconds after passing the abeam point, depending on wind conditions. In this case, we set it at 45seconds. At about 30seconds, Flaps 2 will be called and a 15degrees base turn towards final will be initiated at 45seconds. It will be a slight descend turn with rate at around -200fpm. In the base turn, gears will be lowered, followed by Flaps 3 and eventually Flap Full when nearing final leg. Runway track will be set and then Landing Checklist will be called once in full landing configuration.

Approach has to be stabilised by 500ft AGL, or a go-around will have to be called.

Not that easy eh? Haha.. The start was tough, but subsequent rounds of circuit flying became much better with practice. As for touch&go, the flying is the same, except that no spoilers, reverse thrust and autobrakes will be used. Upon touch down, PF will call for Flaps 2 and engage thrust lever in upright position for 2-3seconds before going TOGA with PM calling for rotate at Approach Speed since there is no Rotate Speed.


As for the feel of full motion as compared to the fixed base simulator I've been flying for the past seven months; it was an eye opener and kind of screwed up what I'm used to. The taxi feel is different as it's much more sensitive. The control stick is also less stiff and the input has no lag, making the flying somehow easier. The graphics is also more realistic, assisting in the lining up of runway centreline on approach. I had so much trouble flying visual circuit in the fixed base during circle-to-land, but this full motion totally changed my game and I'm flying way better now. It's quite a confidence booster when I'm able to land properly and be assured that all my previous landings in the fixed base were of correct technique.

Finally touching the full motion simulator and feeling like a real pilot


Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Hong Kong airport gets green light for S$25bn third runway




The Hong Kong government gave final approval today (March 17) for a third runway at the Asian financial centre's airport, aiming to meet surging growth in passengers and air cargo.

Officials said the project will begin next year and cost HK$141.5 billion (S$25 billion).

About 650 hectares of land will be reclaimed from the sea for the runway and a new passenger building. Construction is expected to be completed by 2023.

Hong Kong International Airport expects to reach maximum capacity under its current layout by 2022 at the latest.

Last year, the airport handled 63.4 million passengers and 4.4 million metric tons of cargo, both records.

The airport predicts that the third runway will allow it to handle 102 million passengers and 8.9 million tons of freight a year by 2030.

Across Asia, airport operators are scrambling to build new terminals or expand existing ones to keep up with growth in air travel.


SOURCE

Qatar Airways boss accuses Delta of flying 'crap' planes


The chief of Qatar Airways on Monday denied his company receives subsidies and accused rivals Delta Air Lines of flying "crap" older planes, escalating hostilities between Gulf and American carriers.

Speaking at an arts conference in Doha, Akbar al-Baker said any money his airline receives from the state is in the form of "legitimate" equity and added his company's fleet of aircraft were much cleaner for the environment in comparison to Delta.

"I think Mr Anderson (CEO of Delta, Richard Anderson) doesn't know the difference between equity and subsidy. We never receive any subsidy," Baker said.

He was responding to claims made earlier this month by three US airlines - Delta, American and United - that Qatar, along with carriers in the United Arab Emirates have received US$42 billion in unfair subsidies to wrest business away from competitors.

Baker also accused Delta of flying "crap airplanes that are 35 years old", when talking about pollution by the aviation industry.

In contrast, Baker said Qatar Airways had an "ultra-modern fleet" and was the lowest CO2 contributor in the aviation industry.



Monday, March 16, 2015

Singapore Airlines' passenger numbers fall in February


Singapore Airlines (SIA) carried fewer passengers in February amid a decline in capacity.

SIA’s passenger load factor fell 1.6 percentage points on-year to 75.2 per cent in February, the airline said in a news release on Monday (Mar 16). SIA's systemwide passenger carriage fell 3.5 per cent on-year, with a 1.3 per cent reduction in capacity.

The greatest drop in passenger demand was for routes plying the Americas and Europe. These fell 7.4 percentage points and 5.4 percentage points respectively, said the airline.

“The competitive landscape continues to be challenging,” said SIA. “Singapore Airlines will remain nimble to redeploy capacity to better match market demand and promotional activities will continue in relevant markets.”

SILKAIR PASSENGER NUMBERS IMPROVE
However, SilkAir’s passenger numbers went up in February, with a 1.2 percentage-point increase on-year in passenger load factor, to 72.7 per cent.

SilkAir carried 10.3 per cent more passengers in February, while there was a 12 per cent on-year increase in capacity.

The overall cargo load factor went up by 5.2 percentage points to 63.3 per cent. Cargo traffic went up 17.1 per cent, while overall capacity rose 7.6 per cent. The load factor went up for all route regions as the capacity changes were closely matched with demand, said SIA.