Saturday, May 19, 2007

IFR

In the United States IFR is generally understood to stand for 'I Follow Roads'. In the civilised world and also in New Zealand (:p) it stands for Instrument Flight Rules, or the ability to fly from one point to another using only the instruments. Every commercial jet flight, good weather or bad operates IFR so it is a pretty key skill that we CTC cadets need to pick up.

Fortunately the DA-42 is ideal for IFR, being fitted with the latest G1000 avionics kit that really is the dogs danglies. The photos bellow were taken from the back of another cadets' flight a few weeks back (cheers, Tom!) and show the arrangement of screens and hood (known in CTC as the 'gimp mask') that we use to simulate IF conditions, in addition to the stunning views from the back of the Twinstar. As you can see, it was perfect IFR weather!!!

In general CP39 news most of us are 10 or less events (we spend most of our time in the sim these days - 'events' and not 'flights') from the end of NZ phases with little under three weeks to run. Will we finish on time? Lets hope so!



And here is the token 'pilot-posing-with-aeroplane' shot. Nice aeroplane, shame about the berk standing infront!

Stay tuned for further updates soon as I have just earned my aerobatic rating, so expect some interesting pictures...

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Shiny new Twinstars

The photo below shows two shiny new Twinstars in the CTC maintainance hangar, CTN and CTO, recently delivered from the factory in Austria ("lets put another shrimp on the barbie!"). After having their wings fitted and fluids etc added they will join the CTC fleet.

The following photos are of a flight that took place a couple of weeks ago out near Raglan.


Photos courtesy of Paul Martin, CP42.