Final period in Ljungbyhed

Almost 960 hours and no see!

As I was before the last post, I've continuously been very busy at school. The main part of the human factors course was completed in January, and after a few weeks of self-studies parallel with flying the twin-engine PA-31 Navajo we've now also had the final theory exam. Fortunately, all twelve students of my class passed the exam with a good margin. The only thing remaining of that course is to submit a five page report on an air accident or incident of one's choice, whose cause is related to human factors. We will then present our conclusions and discuss them on a final classroom meeting, actually in Oslo immediately before our airline course.

The PA-31 flying was really fun! Even though some of us had flown other aircraft outside school at flying clubs etc. and some before they entered the school, nobody had flown a twin-engined or such a large aircraft. Having eight seats in a fairly spacious configuration, retractable landing gear and more than double the engine power compared to the Cirrus SR20 it flies quite differently and it was certainly some valuable 7.5 hours of flying experience. Except being larger and more powerful the individuals in our school's possession are fairly old and so the instrumentation is old-fashioned. While it's not likely we'll ever fly with analog basic instruments commercially, I think that was also some valuable experience.

During these few flight lessons we mostly practiced basic instrument flying focusing on the differences with a larger aircraft and the two engines. Thus, much of the flying time was actually done without getting thrust from one of the engines (setting the thrust lever to zero) practicing handling an engine failure. This means using the feet pedals to control the tail rudder to stabilize the aircraft which otherwise would turn due to the power coming from only one side of the fuselage. Constantly pressing one feet down in this situation is very tiring for one's leg and it's quite challenging in the beginning to still do all the procedures correctly.

After having finished our flight lessons we had a short school trip to Linköping where we got the opportunity to try our capabilities in two possible emergency situations. Firstly we did a hypoxia (lack of oxygen) test where we wore oxygen masks that were fed with air containing an abnormally low amount of oxygen corresponding to an altitude of about 6.7 km. We then were told to solve some puzzles on a paper while talking to an instructor and while an operator monitored our pulse, oxygen blood saturation level etc. After about 5 minutes I started to feel warm and a little dizzy, and the test was aborted. All my classmates did the same test, and the amount of time until saturation levels decreased and what symptoms one got varied a lot from person to person. The objective of the test was simply to experience hypoxia and learn about our individual symptoms to be able to recognize them in the case the cabin pressure would decrease in an airplane and warning systems would not be operational (very unlikely, yes).

The second test on the second day was performed in a small 4 x 3 meter pool. Imagining we had survived a water landing on a rough sea we practiced swimming around with clothes and a life vest on and getting people onboard a life raft. There were waves, strong wind and rain and darkness to make the task more difficult. In the end we were pulled up by a helicopter winch (attached to the ceiling of the room) and rescued. The exercise lasted about 40 minutes, was quite fun and felt very valuable.

Coming back to Ljungbyhed, we then resumed the multi crew cooperation – MCC simulator training. We had most of the simulator lessons where we learn to cooperate in the cockpit in November and December but a few lessons were postponed to not make the gap between school simulator training and the full-scale Boeing 737 type rating simulator training too long for us. Indeed most of us felt a little uncomfortable after the two month interruption, but fortunately it didn't even take one lesson until at least I felt almost as accustomed as I had felt in December. My last four lessons were quite eventful (being the final most difficult part) and we had to cope with doors coming off in mid-air, sick passengers, burning engines, fire and smoke in the cabin and of course really bad weather all the time. At one time the student who was captain had to pretend to get unconscious leaving the co-pilot alone to do everything including landing safely.

Finally, we're now in the middle of our technical course on the Boeing 737. We must learn lots of general knowledge about the aircraft and not the least learn to quickly find facts about any specific feature in the aircraft manual of 1800 pages. Next Monday we have the school technical exam, then on Wednesday we do the full-scale exam for the airline. We then all leave Ljungbyhed for good on Wednesday or Thursday. Next we meet up in Oslo a few days later on Sunday to have our human factors course report presentation and during the following three weeks we have the airline course learning airline specific procedures and policies. After that we'll begin the Boeing 737 type rating simulator training!

As you see, we'll continue to be busy for a while, so don't expect the next blog update to be faster than this was. But it could be.

As a final word, I would like to congratulate all the successful candidates who now have gotten their proofs of admission to TFHS. While it feels a little sad to not be able to be here when you arrive, you are very welcome, and I wish you a huge good luck! We'll surely meet quite a few times anyway, see you in Ljungbyhed!

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