The end of ground school

Firstly, sorry for not updating this as much as I intended. For starters ground school isn't the most interesting of things to write about and the last couple of months have probably been amongst the busiest of my life.

If there's one thing to say about Phase 2 it's that it's probably the most intense learning syllabus that I've ever gone through! The pace of delivery is quicker than anything I've ever come across and after 3 short weeks of teaching and roughly 67 chapters of materials covered it was time for Tests 2s!

Test 2 is the school's internal set of exams midway through the phase to ensure that you're on track with the work and to highlight any areas you need to work on. It is probably the most under-prepared I have ever felt for any set of exams, as it felt like there is no time to actually learn and consolidate the information we had been taught. Thankfully the information must have sunk in somehow as all the exams went very well. After a day a debriefs we were already gearing up to school finals with lessons in Air Law, Operational Procedures and Radio Navigation thrown in on Friday afternoon straight after the last debrief!

After another intensive burst of 3 weeks of teaching it was time for school finals followed by the EASA exams. School finals thankfully went well as well though I will be glad when I no longer have to sit 7 exams in 2 days!

After another week of intense revision it was then time for the final set of EASA exams. I will admit the week didn't start off great, both the Performance and Mass & Balance exams weren't that nice and it didn't really put any of us in a good frame of mind for the rest of the week. Thankfully the week got a little more pleasant from there on out and the final exam on Thursday was soon completed. It was a great feeling to actually be finished, all that was left to do was pick up the log books and headsets we need for the flying phase and then go home to enjoy a nice long weekend.

Revision week for me wasn't totally spent revising for 12 hours a day with no break, I had a couple of amazing opportunities come along which helped to break up the week and remind me what I was putting myself through all this ground school for. On the Tuesday of revision week I got the opportunity to get a tour around an engineering base of Heathrow thanks to people I knew from a previous job. It was great to get back with aircraft again and see them in a new light having done the ground school. I also got the chance to have a go on an A320 simulator was well, it was a procedure trainer as opposed to a full flight simulator (which I should have been on but it broke down that morning) but it basically still functions like a fully operational A320. It was a great afternoon and really interesting to run through a 'flight' and what I would actually be doing as a day to day job. I also got the opportunity later that week to do what is called a familiarisation flight and an A319. This is where you sit on an observers seat on the flight deck to understand what happens during a flight and also during the turnaround as well. It was an amazing experience and I learnt so much on that day and it really did confirm that I was doing the right thing and would love what I was going to do.

The view I had during my familiarisation flight

The final EASA exams were not quite the end of ground school however, the following week we were back in for one final week of classes know as Flight Safety Fundamentals. This is a week of various lectures covering topics such as stabilised approach criteria, crew resource management, operations manual and procedures and culture in the states. It also included the first part of the Bucks New Uni module in Air Transport. Management. This also included a little quiz (where only 40% was needed to pass which was a welcome relief since everything up until now had required a 75% pass mark!) and a debate on one of two topics which everyone got stuck in to making it quite an enjoyable experience.

Soon it came around to Thursday and the end of FSF week which was a bit of an anti-climax if I'm honest as the lectures just finished and it was time for us all to go our separate ways. At the end of the exam week we'd all felt like we'd achieved something and it was good to be finishing whereas after this week there didn't really feel to be any closure.

It was also a bit of a strange time as well because our course is now splitting into 2. Our course was made up of a number of people doing the traditional ATPL route who will now go out to Phoenix to complete their basic flight training but was also had a number of people sponsored by EasyJet completing an MPL (basically a slightly different qualification route to becoming a first officer) and they will be completing their basic flight training at Oxford. It's a shame we're not all going out to Phoenix and will be odd not to be going through as a group from now on as we've helped each other out a lot over the last 7 months.

I will admit that I've gotten so far behind writing these posts that I'm now actually out in Phoenix and have started the training programme out here, but I'll leave that for another post.