Back to Basics

Another Hangar, another country

Greetings from South Africa. It's been a while since my last post, but since this is about my flying antics, it's really only appropriate to post when I'm flying, which I did today.

First though, a brief update: Since arriving in Kenya just over two months ago we have settled in to a great house in a good location, we've bought a car, and I've sat a couple of flying exams. The first was a Commercial Pilot License conversion paper, which was basically a mini-version of the 14 exams I sat four years ago in the UK. Interestingly enough the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority has saw fit to buy the European exam question bank, so many of the questions were familiar.

The bigger test however was finding the place. I nearly became famous as the only pilot to have failed the paper because he couldn't navigate successfully to the exam centre, which doesn't bode well for finding a dirt strip in the middle of Turkana.

Despite that little drama, I did recognise many of the old JAA ATPL questions and some I even got right, managing to scrape a pass with 81%. Phew. Some of my former colleagues in both MAF and AIMAIR have taken several attempts to pass this exam, so it was great to get it over and done with.

The second exam was a type-rating exam for the Cessna 206 aircraft. This was also filled with incident. Normally in a multiple-choice exam you find one correct and 3 wrong answers. In this paper many of the questions had 3 correct answers, and some had 4 wrong answers. Subsequently I found I had failed with 62%.

The following week, last Wednesday to be exact, I did a resit. This time I sat the correct paper (don't ask, but let's just say that the invigilator the first week was a trainee and I had been given an out-of-date exam for a different aircraft) and passed with 94%. That's Africa for you.

So now I find myself at Lanseria Airport (NorthWest of Jo'burg) doing a week's training in the venerable 206, prior to starting as a line pilot back in Nairobi. Today was 'becoming one with the aircraft-again' after a period of six months absence. So we strapped in, learned yet another set of checklists (for some reason MAF International and MAF US ones are different) and taxied out. We took off (5kts slow, ouch), flew around, did some stalls and steep turns, flew back to Lanseria, landed (5kts too fast, double ouch), did a few more circuits and landed again. Marvellous. If you take my take-off speed, add it to the landing speed and divide by two, I was spot on. Still it's always good to manage my instructor's expectations and leave room for 'improvement' as the week goes on.

More tomorrow....