National Flight Instructor

I passed my flight test today for my National Flight Instructor Rating Grade C, so I will now be able to train my own students.. very chuffed and looking forward to this next phase of my aviation life. Thanks to my Instructor and flight school partner Brad for the hours he spent with me having as much fun as I was in my plane teaching me some of the more advanced techniques the Sling is capable of. Thanks also to Johnny our airline pilot who handled the flight test. Looking forward to working more with you. I am the first student of Durban Skyye Flight School to commence and complete training at the fledgling flight school.. many more to follow!! 

Johnny (right) with Dave during the flight test

It's a thumbs-up from Dave enjoying his flight test

About to go 

The view of the beachfront homeward bound on a poor weather day finishing off the flight test

Johnny completes the skills test assessment for submission to Raasa

Solo awards braai

Enjoying a braai at Light Flight School on Tuesday, Geoff and Noel handed out licence certificates and Solo awards to their students. Thanks guys for my certificate and for getting me this far. The sky's the limit, or is it?

Back to the drawing board

One of my flying instructors, Brad (centre) pops around for a drink and a braai with Llewellyn (right) and myself (left). This helped me re-focus after failing the Navigation exam yesterday and today it's back to the drawing board. I have Mets and Aircraft General next week as well as a re-write of Navigation on Friday.

It's definitely do-able, just needs me to refocus on that horrible  Whizz wheel thing I only bought this week for some of the calculations needed for the exam. I prefer to understand a concept and then manually calculate the answers using the formulas I know. Anyhow I never got to use the Whizz wheel in the exam and preferred to draw out the wind vectors with my protractor and did some angle measuring. Not good enough to pass but will get there with a bit more practice this week.

For Mets I have been doing some reading on some of the strange abbreviations you find to describe weather in Metars (Meteorological Aerodrome Reports) - here they are, with acknowledgment to Darren Smith who did the research.

What comes up must come down

The crew at Light Flight School got a table of pilots and friends together for a pasta evening. Here's my instructor Noel (above right) giving the thumbs up. Then this morning I accomplished my first landings... wow, what a feeling! I was concentrating so heavily though that I forgot to take a photo and had to snap one in the car returning home to remember the day. Hopefully it wasn't just a lucky day like playing pool sometimes when you can just about sink any ball and the next day none. Well I managed to get that plane pretty steady and just floating down out of the sky... bit of a bump with the landing, but not too shabby. Was on a high the rest of the day!