Bye bye sky (sigh)

Hi!

The fall is about to turn into winter here in Ljungbyhed, with frost on the car windows and the grass in the mornings and the sun setting at 4 p.m. My last flight this year was 16 days ago – soon after my previous blog post. I was looking forward to it a lot – it was a solo flight from Ljungbyhed to Kristianstad Airport (doing a ”touch-and-go-landing”) after a detour to southern Småland region, then to Malmö Sturup Airport (ditto), and then flying along most of Skånes west coast to Höganäs, and finally return to Ljungbyhed. It's a two hour flight, almost twice my longest flight before that.

Anyway, on the morning when I was scheduled to leave at 08:30 the sky was quite cloudy and the wind pretty strong so I was pretty sure it would be cancelled. However my instructor was positive – even though the the cloud ceiling (height) was only barely acceptable she thought it would not be worse than our limits, and regarding the wind she said that if the wind would be too strong to land at the other airports I could just skip the actual landing and then continue as planned. The forecast said there would not be any problem at Ljungbyhed airport. So a quite happy student could fly as scheduled.

Since it was my first solo flight to other airports, and only my second altogether, I was not used to the communication procedures at the other airports, and so the air traffic controllers had to correct me several times, but there was no problem with the flight itself. The weather was ok for most of the time however a little hazy at Kristianstad which was unpredicted.

My solo Skåne-roundtrip was on October 25th, and since the following day was cancelled, that also marked the start of my roughly four months of pure ground training (theory classes). During the first period, from now until the end of January we will study general navigation, meteorology and air law. Meteorology is what it sounds like, and pretty much a more exhaustive repetition of the meteorology course we took for the private pilot licence (PPL). General navigation is a lot about coordinates and angles why my math and physics skills will certainly be useful. One important fundamental problem is to calculate the track (route angle) and distance between two points considering the spheric nature of Earth. Meaningly to learn how to fly the shortest route across the Atlantic ocean etc. that looks like an arch on the map. Air law is of course about the legal regulations on the air industry, this time from a commercial pilot's perspective. E.g. the maximum number of passengers per flight attendant and other essential knowledge.

Photos:

 

I don't want to read the PPL literature anymore, so I sold everything. I won't miss it (I hope)! I will probably have the same feeling for the ATPL (commercial licence) literature in a year, that's four more books and probably three times the total number of pages.

 

My brother visited me a weekend for some Skåne sightseeing and try out sitting of the school's airplanes. The colours of the Söderåsen national park fall leaves were fantastic!

I've still been far from busy lately so I've seen a lot of movies and played videogames. Airplane! (in Sweden ”Titta vi flyger”) is probably the best aviation comedy film out there, here's one of the countless unforgettable scenes. The pilots' names are Roger, Victor and Clarence Oveur.