Before I leave

In less than a month’s time, I’d completed the Basic Wings Course in Pearce and depart for home. I realized that I’ve not exactly experienced the local culture here in Western Australia. Thus, I’ve decided that I would love to try the following activities before I depart:

• Horse riding – one of the most common and popular activity here in Australia that you don’t usually see it back home


• Go Kart – For the thrill of the speed


• Paint ball shootout – Bet it’ll be fun to experience life of a ‘SWAT’ team and scoring hits on opponents.

Can’t wait for weekends to come!

 (0 comment) | Jun 28, 2008

Spotlight

As I embarked onto navigation phase of my flying training, maps and Staedtler markers surrounds me all day and the tedious process of preparing maps takes away precious time and crippled my leisure activities, thus restricting me from posting updates. I have been rising an hour early for the past couple of weeks to prepare maps, hoping that this painful ordeal of preparing maps will end quickly. Unfortunately, the weather has been unforgiving last week and this resulted in maps being redrawn numerous times.

Not to mention that things hasn’t been smooth sailing, with people committing offences and still not feeling bothered. These unnecessary spotlights have resulted in harsher measures as well as confinement. I wonder if one actually thinks of the consequences before executing certain actions. I have personally witness such situations and I felt disturbed because I can’t accept the fact that this will be the group of unprofessional people I’ll be working with in years to come.

 (0 comment) | Jun 15, 2008

Night flying

As the sun starts to set and stars fills the empty skies, I feel my heart beating faster and excitement rising within me. Today will be my very first time attempting to fly a jet aircraft in the dark with minimum lighting surrounding the airfield. So much on what have been taught in the books about the various psychological effects in the night, I am keeping my fingers crossed and praying that I’ll execute the mission safely.

I never realized how beautiful the cockpit presentation is until I’ve started up the engines and adjusted all the interior lighting. The dim red console lights aids in calibrating the eyes to the night environment pretty quickly. With lightings around the airfield demarcating the various taxiways and runways, the only difficulty I encountered was to judge the separation distance from other aircraft taxiing ahead.

After obtaining clearance for take-off from the tower, I proceeded to line up on the runway for the take-off roll. Upon rotation and getting airborne, I was amazed by the night view and it wasn’t difficult to spot the brightly lighted skyscrapers in Perth City. My instructor demoed one circuit and landing before I was given the opportunity to try it. I must say that landing in the night (with landing lights) is challenging as misjudging or late in flaring the aircraft would be disastrous.

Sad to say, at our current stage of training, night flying is only an introduction and it consists of only 4 sorties. However, it is definitely a great experience and confidence booster, knowing that I am able to pilot an aircraft safely in the night.

May 12, 2008

Coffee beans and perfume

While shopping around Harbour Town a few weeks ago, I came across this perfume store and decided to drop by to check out the fragrance collection. As I picked up a test stripe on the counter, I saw this glass of coffee beans and a few others being placed around the shop. Curiosity kicked in and the mischievous side of me decided to experiment a little to find out the real purpose of the coffee beans.

I dipped one of the test stripe covered with perfume deep into the coffee beans for a few seconds. Upon retrieving it, I smelled it and to my surprise, the stripe is now covered by rich coffee aroma. A search on the internet confirmed my little experiment.

Findings: Coffee beans enables on to reset the sense of smell after sampling a perfume, thus allowing you to continue sampling other fragrances without the previous smell lingering around.

Interesting indeed.

May 4, 2008

Responsibilities

Now that the last few seniors from the most senior flying course have graduated, the ‘senior’ title has finally arrived at our doorstep. Many would think that this automatically grants one more power in making decisions and that they feel ‘inferior’ over the juniors. Personally, I beg to differ from this persecution as I feel that it is morally incorrect to behave in this manner, not to mention that we are all trainees.

For one, as the most senior course, we should set good example at all times and not behave like the juniors. I remembered when I was the most junior course, duties were being passed down to us one after another and the most senior course will always find excuses to avoid them. Perhaps, many would say this is the culture of the organization but I thought that it was otherwise. It is more of the human mind being unequal and trying to exercise authoritative as the most senior course.

Certainly, I agree that duties will eventually need to be handed down as advance flying requires more preparation. However, one should not go away with the idea of ‘I’m the senior…pass it down to the juniors’ or ‘when we were juniors, this is how the seniors treated us’. This is the wrong mentality towards being professional and ethically wrong. We must be fair, tactful and earn one’s respect in handling responsibilities instead of just pushing it down the line.

I always tell myself that they may be your juniors in this phrase of training but some may eventually be your superior in the near future.

Apr 30, 2008