Jimisola.com - keepin’ on

It was a big step closer to completion of the ATPL theory when I had passed all mandatory ATPL school exams on yesterday (Wednesday). After four days of studying for the Swedish CAA (Luftfartsstyrelsen) ATPL exams and then - hopefully - I’ll be done with those tests Wednesday. It going to be a huge relief when the theory is out of the way - not always having the theory giving me a guilty conscience.

I can’t believe that this is actually happening - the finish line is close now, just have to run through.

It feels as if it was not too long that I started a Lund University School of Aviation and thought that “Boy, there is going to be four periods of exams!”. With three periods of exams already passed that time is now! The mere though of all ATPL theory - hopefully - being done in ten days in unbearable knowing that having passed all tests the relief will be well-earned.

Tomorrow’s Mandatory tests (i.e. school tests prior to next week’s CAA tests) are Instrumentation, Principles of Flight and IFR Communication. Wednesday holds Flight Planning and Monitoring and Performance.

My days are currently filled with theory studies as the final ATPL exams (last ATPL block) are coming up in less than two weeks…

Cannot wait until my ATPL exams are over as there are quite a lot of things I have planned, or at least hoped, to do once all ATPL exams are done, such as:

1. train more
2. catch up with friends
3. catch up on new music
4. hang out in Malmö more
5. upgrade my blog from WordPress 2.3.2 to the new and better 2.5 version
6. try out the new Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
7. get Liferay Portal to work for our student union and perhaps code some Java ()

All this - and a lot more - will be possible in merely 23 days…

And yes, I got back safe-and-sound from the four-day trip around Europe. Everything went a long quite smooth to be honest and there were no mishaps. We took around 400 pictures, but I haven’t had time to through them yet (that too is on the list). After the finals, I’ll add some pictures to the picture gallery. Sadly, the weather during our trip was not too good with overcasts and low clouds, but there should be some nice pictures.

Everything is planned, prepared and ready for a four day tour around Europe starting Monday morning (tomorrow that is)!

Sadly, I’ve had a slight cold and a stopped-up nose and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to go tomorrow. Really hope that I can go because I’ve invested a lot time in it and I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time as well.

This European tour is something practically every student at the school has been looking forward to since we got admitted (just like tour to Northern Sweden). We have spent hours planning for this trip. Looking up routes and airports, contacting airports about fueling, parkering etc. Be advised that finding and filing airways routes through Germany that get accepted is a hazzle, close to impossible to be honest.

Anyway, if I’m on then it will be one PA31 (SE-ITD), one flight instructor and three students including myself.

Our days are planned as follows:

• Day 1 (Mon April 14th): Ljungbyhed - Groeningen, The Netherlands - Kent/Manston, UK - Jersey, UK (I’m flying the last leg)
• Day 2 (Tue April 15th): Jersey, UK - Dijon, France - Salzburg, Austria - Prag, Tjeckia
• Day 4 (Thu April 17th): Prag, Tjeckia - Cologne/Bonn, Germany - Templehof, Germany - Ljungbyhed

I’m back in Ljungbyhed again after almost ten (10!) days in sweet Malmö. Really enjoyed being home and off school during Easter. I’ve written quite a lot on my thesis on Threat and Error Management. It is not due until the end of August so it feels good that I’ve come this far along already. I will now have my main focus on ATPL block 3 theory (Communications, Flight Planning, Instrumentation, Performance and Principles of Flight)) and, of course, on flying. We have a lot of flying to do and soon we have our four day European tour with three students and one teacher in each airplane. We’ll have layovers in Jersey and Prague.

Then theory exams are in the end of May and flight exam (CPL/ME/IR) is up by the end of June.

During the Easter break I trained with my group and ran quite a lot (8×200m, 6×400m, 3×3x150m hill etc). It felt really good to be back for a “longer” period even though we wrestled with bad weather (snow/rain, 3-5 degress Celsius and windy). I got my training rhythm back and time will tell about a summer season…

Tomorrow I have two exercises. The first one is flight with limited panel (no attitude indicator) and abnormal attitudes (high/low nose) and the second, which includes the “Kodak moment”, contains the following:

1. Instrument take off
2. Demo engine failure above Safe Altitude (1000ft above ground level)
3. Demo engine failure in flight
4. Feather/unfeather procedure
5. Rapid descent
6. Flapless (0° flap) landing

Pay special attention to 4. Feathe/unfeature procedure during this exercise we feather and “shutdown” one of our engine for a few minutes! Then we start it up again (and unfeather). The reason why it is called the “Kodak moment” is because people always takes pictures when the engine is shutdown and the propeller is standing still in air (and hence not windwilling). So will I

Note: On some variable-pitch propellers, the blades can be rotated parallel to the airflow to reduce drag and increase gliding distance in case of an engine failure. This is called feathering.

Too much. So, where do I start?

Let’s start with track… My club hosted the Swedish Indoor Championships this weekend. My club mates managed to get six gold, five silver and two bronze medals!

I had hoped that I would be able to run 60m dash myself as I was on a training streak in December and it went really well. Had my lovely spike shoes on and ran in them for the first time in almost a year! I even sat a new PB in jumping over a bar/hurdle with 145cm (previous record was 4-5 years old at least and, yes, I know that Stefan Holm has far greater springiness)! Sadly, the groin started to act out again between Christmas and New Year’s and I lost my momentum. However, my physio claims that I’m strong enough - “it should work” - and training felt so good that I’m not giving up just yet. I’ve been persistent on making it back since it started (fall of 2005) and I truly dream about being back on the track competing. Time will tell…

Life at the moment more or less equals aviation. The last three weeks have been hectic as we started to fly the PA31 Navajo and been flying almost everyday. I had my first bird strike during these weeks. Luckily, it was just a small sparrow that hit us after take-off and not one of bigger birds that “hangs” here at the airport. The exercises have been mainly airwork, i.e. training slow flight, stall, steep turns etc with one and two engines. I’m usually quite tired after the exercises as every exercise drills me on something new and therefore requires a lot of focus. But, it’s fun and that is the most important thing in the long run. It also helps to know that each day is a day closer to graduation…

As I mentioned before we are getting close to start flying the twin-engined PA31 Navajo. But prior to that we have a couple of sessions in our old FNPT2 (Flight Navigation Procedure Trainer) where we learn the basics of the airplane, such as instrumentation, switches, checklist etc. So, the last week have been full of checklist rehearsals since we need to know parts of the checklist by-heart (i.e. without looking at the checklist when we perform the checklist items).

During the PA31 phase the students are “teamed up” two and two. My buddy is Espen (from Norway) and we’ve been working on the checklists together quite a lot. We are scheduled on Thursday to have our demo ride. It an en-route flight where a Flight Instructor flies to give us a mental picture of what to expect from us in five months we are to do our skill test for CPL/ME/IR.

I’ve been longing to upgrade to WordPress 2.3.x for a long time. There are some nice features that I wanted. So, when Freshy 2.0 was released I could not really wait.

The internals of Freshy 2.0 is quite different from Freshy 1.0, so I haven’t decided if I’ll do my mod Freshy JL mod of it. Most likely, I will try to make it happen with just the new Customize plugin that Freshy uses. I have some concerns, but I’ll adress them with the author of Freshy and to see what we can come up with. I would really like if I just have to make my own style and not change php (better having just one theme than a theme and a mod). Hopefully, the things that I miss can be added as options or something.

The most urgent one is to have pages, comments, links, categories etc itemized in some way (using bullets or something - the way Freshy 1 ). The current way makes it really hard to see where a “Recent Comment” or “Recent Post” begins and ends. I’d also like to have RSS feeds after Categories and Tags.

Anyway, please be patient as I will do some styling (changes to colors and layout) when I have the time.

Julien (”Jide”) has finally released Freshy 2! There have been some major improvements such as support for WP 2.3 features (tags), multiple sidebars etc etc. The theme looks stunning as usual. Cannot wait to try it out!

I did my own mod of Freshy 1 and will try to make a mod of Freshy 2 that looks like my previous mod.

Hopefully I’ll get started this weekend However, I want to contact Jide first regarding modding his theme.