Happy new year!

After the EASA phase 1s we had only the weekend off before starting straight back at the academy and into phase 2. Having only just done exams and it being just two weeks until Christmas we were less than enthusiastic about starting work again. It was also kind of sad how we have some new teachers, don’t get me wrong they’re all fantastic but we were used to our old phase 1 instructors and new instructors and new subjects took a little getting used to. Our System’s instructor covered one of the lessons and we cheered him back into the classroom again. Ground school is hard work but it has a pretty great atmosphere!

Here’s all of the phase 2 subjects

• Air Law – Past students have warned me about this one, it’s a massive book and apparently quite tedious with loads of dates, facts and figures to remember. Gulp.

• Flight Planning – I’m imagining this to be quite a tricky one. We use booklets called ‘CAPS’ containing tonnes of graphs and figures.

• General Navigation – I taught Basic Nav. As a C.I. at Air Cadets, this is definitely a lot more advanced and there’s already too much maths and trigonometry involved. We also do a lot of work on the CRP-5 which is very clever once you learn how to use it.

• Mass & Balance – By far the smallest book, so far it’s been fairly straight forward calculations for weight, CG position and moments.

• Operational procedures – The human performance of Phase 2, there’s a lot of random bits of information to remember and very few pictures in the book L But on the plus side we have our class mentor as our instructor!

• Performance – Principles of Flight part 2, I’m finding I actually understand most of it and we still have our PoF instructor.

• Radio Navigation – Completely new to me, this is concerned with frequencies, ranges and navigation aids such as VOR & ILS. I’m finding it pretty difficult at the moment; it’s most similar to Instruments from phase 1. I think this is already my least favourite….

We’ve also had to start doing CBTs again however there was only two weeks of phase 2 before we broke up for two weeks off during the Christmas period. It was lovely being home, seeing friends and family and going to my cadet dining in night once more. We got a fair amount of snow (I live in Sheffield) though it only came on Boxing Day and not on Christmas. I also went to see the new Hobbit film in Imax which was incredible!

I took all of my books home and definitely intended on studying more than I did. However I found I needed a break and everyday just seemed to get filled up very quickly. This is dangerous as I can’t afford to forget weeks 1 and 2 when there’s talk of Test 2s in week 4!

AND, I got some awesome Ray-Ban aviators for Christmas though, I’m a real pilot now!