Matriculation at TFHS

Hej, efter att ha funderat en hel del på om jag verkligen ska skriva en blogg eller inte, och på vilket språk jag ska skriva, så har jag tillslut beslutat att skriva ändå, fast på engelska. Detta med förhoppningen att fler kompisar ska läsa helt enkelt. Jag ber om ert överseende!

Welcome! This is my first submission to my web log about my studies at Lund University: School of Aviation (Trafikflyghögskolan, TFHS), with the aim to become an airline pilot in the future. The course spans about 2½ years between June 4th 2012 and January 23th 2015 and the goal of the course is to acquire a technical bachelor’s degree and pilot licenses of the type PPL for flying small airplanes privately and MPL for flying commercially.

While most of you probably know me well, I will introduce myself for other visitors, if any. My name is Daniel Andersson, I’m 24 years old and born in Falun in Sweden. I studied natural science in high school, then I’ve studied Japanese for 2 years at Dalarna University and physics for 3 years at Uppsala University. I’ve studied in Japan two times one year each as an exchange student. I do skydiving and play video games in my free time.

While my future plans did not include working as a pilot at all until quite recently, about a year ago, by a chance I remembered the School of Aviation (from here on I’ll call it TFHS) when thinking about in September last year what courses I want to take during the coming spring. I had heard about it as a high school student from friends who intended to apply for it, however I wasn’t especially interested then, because I wanted to be a famous scientist. But in fall last year, my scientist dream had already faded after finding out that physics wasn’t for me as exciting I thought it would be, and also that working as a researcher (and the way there) is much tougher than I had imagined.

While my first thought was that I’d probably never be accepted, because of the high popularity, I decided to apply just in case, and for fun. After three rather tough sets of entrance exams over 200 applicants were reduced to 12 admitted students and to my great surprise and joy, I was one of them. The first exam was a written exam in Lund (southern Sweden) consisting of various parts testing our memory, simultaneous capacity, logical thinking etc. The second exam after half of the examinees were selected was held in Stockholm (convenient for me living in Uppsala) and consisted of a group work task, and a memory and simultaneous capacity test on a computer. Before the third exam half of the remaining examinees were again selected, and this time we were interviewed by a teacher and a psychologist.

I got my acceptance letter on March 29th, and after that I had to undertake an exhaustive medical examination, which I did in Lund a few weeks later. While they tested a lot of things, it only took a few hours but cost me about 6600 SEK… On May 8th I finally got a positive result from the medical examination and all obstacles were cleared, while I was an additional 3000 SEK poorer for the license related paperwork. On June 3rd, after having tried my best to finish my other studies in beforehand (in vain), I moved from Sweden’s 4th largest city Uppsala to the tiny village of roughly 2000 inhabitants Ljungbyhed in northern Skåne county.

On Monday June 4th (yesterday) we had an introduction day for the school where we got lots of information and could see and test sit the two types of airplanes that we will pilot during the 1½ year long part of the course actually at TFHS in Ljungbyhed. Today, on Tuesday June 5th, we had our first ordinary school day with theory classes in flight navigation and general knowledge about airplanes. Already in three weeks from now, around June 25th most of us will manoeuvre an aircraft for the first time. I look forward to it infinitely!

About the schedule – we will have a three weeks short summer break in July but otherwise we have class continuously until Christmas, and during summer and fall (not winter) we will have lots of practical flight lessons on dedicated “flight weeks” together with theory classes on “theory weeks”. Our first exams will be in the middle of September.

In spring next year we are supposed to acquire our PPL (Private Pilot License) and then we are free to, for example, hire an airplane in an aviation club and fly whenever we want. In fall next year we will finish our ATP (Airline Transport Pilot) theory and starting that winter we will learn how to fly one specific commercial airliner (=airplane). After that, during the last 4 months or so of the course, we will have an internship at an airline using the type we’ve learnt and actually work as a first officer (=co-pilot, styrman, andrepilot). Then we will graduate and have to find jobs, which can be really tough in this industry.

By the way, while we actually were supposed to be informed about what type of airplane we will learn to fly, and which airline we will do the internship at, it’s unfortunately not decided yet. Hopefully it will be decided in a few months. Probably our class will be split into two parts belonging to different airlines with different airplane types, and the probability is high that one of those airlines will be Norwegian (who mainly has Boeing 737s), but I have no idea about the other one. The reason for this delay is that City Airline went bankrupt recently (as a subsidiary of Skyways), and a bunch of students at TFHS belonged to them. These airlines are called “host-airlines” of TFHS.

Please write a comment if you like, or have questions!

Photos:

 

My room in Ljungbyhed. A really nice student corridor building only for pilot students (at the moment around 40 people including two Norwegian classes). The school is located 50 meters away, and the airplane hangar around 500 meters away. I can see the planes really close coming in for landing from my window.

Ljungbyhed airport has four runways, of which two are in use (11L/29R and 11R/29L). However only private and educational flying.

 A Cirrus SR-20, the plane we will fly during most of our practical training here at TFHS.

 

A Piper PA-31, the plane we will fly a little during the last part of our practical training here at TFHS.