It has been almost day to day one month since Ivo and myself arrived in Madrid for our typerating. We have a weekend of now after our loftsession yesterday night. This loftsession is actually a session like our skilltest of monday but with our own instructor. He decides after this session if we are ready for the skilltest.
Since the last post, two weeks have past and including the loft we have spend 32 hours in the full flight simulator. Every session was 4h of which we flew one part as PF (Pilot Flying) and one part as PNF (Pilot Non Flying), so basically half the time in the left seat and the other half in the right seat. These sessions were quite heavy for us due to timing because every day we had briefing at 21h30, entering the sim at 23h untill 3h at night and another half hour debriefing. Luckily we had a day off after every two sessions and even the complete weekend that was in between. It remained heavy because aside the long session there are also the hours we need to study and rehearse when you are awake before going back to the simulator in the evening.
Everything passed a quite fast speed and we passed every session without really big problems. The high level we had at school really came in handy. There were of course some moments that it wasn't going that great or even not so good session at all but this was mainly because of fatigue or stress.
The first session was mainly ment to get to know the aircraft and performing some basic exercises to achieve this. This meant flying a lot manually and performing exercises like accelerating/decelerating, turning, climbing/descending, stalls, overspeed,..all exercises to see how the aircraft will react.
From session two the real work like in a operational environnement would start. This means doing exactly what you will do like the first crew arriving at the aircraft for the first flight of the day. These are the preparations in the cockpit, setting boardcomputer, briefings, pushback and start, taxi to the runway and every action and checklist associated with these phases like we will do them everyday in the future.
After this we started with some basic flight to learn how to do every action after takeoff, climbing out, cruise, decent preparation, decent until landing, parking and securing the aircraft after the last flight of the day. Every day we added some more items and started focussing more on the type of approaches you can have. The are the ways you will approach the airport and land there, like precision or non-precision approaches and if you will do these manually or completely via the autopilot. And even after that you can choose if you will fly it mainly on autopilot or manually by just flying instruments and using the sidestick to decent and correct your flightpath.
After the first week of normal procedures like everyday we started to add some failures. This went from small failures where you just needed to push a button or turn a switch till bigger failures like enginefailures, smoke aboard, emergency descent, hydraulic failures causing you to fly manually and so on. Especially the parts that limited you to fly manually with limited flightcontrols were really interesting. Manual flying is something that we won't do a lot on the line so it was enjoying in between the hard work. The workload started to increase but we handled everything nice and we remained safe during the entire training.
The loftsession yesterday were they judged if we were ready for the skilltest went without really big problems and we are ready to bring this to a good end next monday morning. Ivo and myself have the weekend off and we will use this to review some items we already know but need to review. These are mainly the standard procedures, possible failures, engine failure procedure, charts of the airport,...
Monday we also receive some more information about our basetraining, the training in the real aircraft. We know already that it will be on the 21st of June in Barcelona. This training contains of at least 6 toch and go's in a real Airbus A320. This will be done with a real captain next to us and probably in an aircraft of Vueling at the airport of Reus,Barcelona. But we don't know this for sure until monday.
This also means that I will be home again next weekend and that is right on time for Genk on Stage. Now the only thing left to do is hope that I can bring some good weather from here because I received some rumours that it is more fall than summer in Belgium.
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