Basic Phase complete ☑
- Connor Raven
- Sep 12, 2018
- 2 min read
Hey everyone and welcome back.
I've just completed the Basic Phase of my training and it has been great fun!
The Basic Phase of the easyJet MPL is our equivalent to the IR training completed by ATPL cadets. We'd all had a taster of IR flying both in New Zealand and during our time in Bournemouth, but it was now time to take what we'd learnt a stage further and apply it to the Airbus!
The first few lessons were titled simply, 'Performance & Control'. It was during these initial sessions that we'd start to get a feel for the aircraft and practice our turns, climbs & descents, basic visual approaches and takeoff profiles, as well as put our newly learned SOPs into action and see how working in a multi crew environment works. Overall, I really enjoyed the Basic Phase, my favourite part of my training so far... it was an amazing feeling to finally be in a jet, albeit £10 million worth of simulator for now!
For the Basic Phase, I was grouped with two other cadets on my course and with each simulator session lasting for four hours it did prove to be quite tiring... especially the early morning sessions!
Once the initial control lessons were complete it was back to the IR side of flying. We practiced both VOR and NDB holds & approaches as well as a LOC/DME and full ILS approach to land. The technique to flying the holds and procedures itself were by and large the same as in a light aircraft. There were of course a few differences to account for, such as the increased size of Airbus compared to anything we'd flown before as well as the increased speed and inertia of the aircraft.
The hardest thing I found about manually flying the Airbus during the Basic Phase is the anticipation of everything! Even flying around at green dot (Vmd - speed for minimum drag, roughly 207kts) you'll be doing approximately 3.5 miles per minute and at that sort of speed early on in the phase it was very easy to miss turns or shoot through the hold axis.
The Airbus carries alot of inertia so anticipation is required during all manoeuvres such as turning or levelling off at an altitude. Thinking ahead and being one step ahead of the game at all times was imperative and this only came with practice and good workload management and situational awareness.
However, that aside, once your workload was under control and you were a step ahead, the Airbus was lovely too fly. It's a very automated aircraft with auto trim and full autopilot to name a few features, more of which will be covered in further posts.
There we have it, a brief overview of the Basic Phase and my first taste of the A320. I'm now on a week's holiday before returning back to Southampton next week to start the A320 type rating groundschool. Once that's compete I should find out where I'm going to be based and it'll also be time to start my A320 type rating itself!
Until then 🛫
Comments