Week 5- General Navigation

Evening readers and welcome to this weeks blog post! This week has predominantly been about General Navigation but first Principles of Flight. Monday was the final day studying this monumental topic. We finished off talking about propellers and how they work as well as limitations of aircraft and the effects of a contaminated aerofoil i.e snow, ice, rain, dirt etc on the wing. Unfortunately, many accidents in history can be put down to contaminated wings such as Air Ontario Flight 1363 which crashed just after take off because the wings couldn't generate enough lift due to 0.6-1.3 cm of ice on the wing. Now we have finished POF it's time to hit the practice exams and revision to make sure we can get a decent score!

A phenomenon known as rime ice accumulating
 on the wing

The rest of the week has been spent learning about General Navigation. Topics covered this week include the different types of charts used in aviation, how to work out distances between points on the earth but the most fun by far (yes I used the word fun!) has been using the CRP-5 computer. One of these bad boys will set you back £80, and for that you don't get a screen, a keyboard or even a mouse! Despite being called a computer, it isn't really a computer at all but what it is is a student pilots best friend. It enables you to convert numbers into different units, find out what speeds you are flying at but best of all (and my favourite part of the CRP5) it allows you to work out wind velocity (wind speed and direction) relative to the aircraft. 

CRP 5 Navigation computer (it even looks cool)

I am hoping for a lot of questions using the CRP5 in the exam as at the moment it is one of the few things I understand! Unfortunately it was a hard week this week being in school for 5 days (our first 5 day week since we started!) 

This weekend has been spent revising GNAV and POF as well as revisiting Mass and Balance and HPL before the mock exams a week tomorrow! Just before I sign off for another week, here is Joe trying to spell easyjet after an afternoons revision...

Its good to know Joe can spell the name
 of the airline we are due to work for....

That's all for this week!