Alex Brett

Author's posts

G1000 Conversion

One of the club’s aircraft (G-MEGS) has a G1000 glass cockpit – this means that instead of the ‘analogue’ instruments that most aircraft have, which look a bit like this: It has two big LCD screens on which the information is shown (together with a few standby instruments in case they fail), like this:   …

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Visit ATC day at Swanwick

NATS (National Air Traffic Services), who essentially run the UK airspace, along with the towers at the big commercial airports, and several other ATC providers organise “Visit ATC days” to let pilots see things ‘from the other side’ as it were. I signed up to one at the NATS centre at Swanwick – this is …

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Night lesson

It’s the right time of year to do a night rating (as we hit ‘official’ night (which is defined as sunset + 30 minutes) during normal club opening times), so I’ve decided to get this done. I don’t intend to fly at night regularly (in a single engine aircraft if an engine failure occurs at …

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First post-test flight

While I’m waiting for the CAA to issue my license, I can still fly solo with an instructors authorisation – I did this for the first time today, on a little local flight. The wind was a little bit of a concern, as just as I was about to head out and start checking out …

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Skills Test

Today I took (and passed) my skills test! The week started with days of very low visibility and low cloud, so I wasn’t hopeful, but yesterday the forecast was looking very positive, and thankfully it proved correct. I’d been given the route the evening before so I was able to do my planning etc, and …

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Darwin Flights

My trip to Amsterdam ended up a little more eventful than expected. As mentioned in my last post I’d been told I was the only passenger, and all was looking good – I boarded the aircraft on schedule, doors were closed, I heard the APU start up and then the switchover to it from ground …

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Practice Skills Test (2)

After a couple of attempts that were cancelled due to the weather, I was finally able to complete my practice skills test today.Watch movie online The Transporter Refueled (2015) First up was doing the three stalls – the first (a full stall with no flaps, recovering when instructed) was fine – a slight peep from …

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Today’s lesson was aiming to cover the things I was less confident on, we got through most of them, with the exception of cross wind practise, as there was very little wind at all today. First up was a PFL – while in general I got the procedure correct, there were a couple of things …

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More flying at last

After a nearly 2 month gap due to work committments and my general stress levels not being conducive to flying, I had two lessons this week. Both lessons involved circuits, as the cloud base wasn’t suitable for going out in to the local area. My first circuit was (as you might expect) a little all …

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Open Letter to the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC)

I intend to send the below letter to the PCI SSC outlining some (hopefully constructive) criticism of the PCI Data Security Standards. For those not familiar with them, in simple terms they are a set of rules that anybody dealing with credit card data has to follow and comply with (there’s a lot more detail …

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