Friday 1st September 2023 to Saturday 30th September 2023. 48 hours 48 minutes flying time, total distance of 15,120nm and total of 3,486 passengers flown. I have completed my 8 supernumerary flights as well as flown a total of 24 sectors for Ryanair. To put those numbers above into a bit of context, the distance is 70.0% of the way around the equator and the number of people would fill over 43 double decker London busses! I’m not going to explain every single flight I’ve done over the following blogs, just highlight a few achievements and milestones, plus anything I think is interesting that’s gone on! I’m also going to take a bit of inspiration from other blogs, social media accounts and YouTubers to answer some questions that I see asked frequently just to give a greater understanding of what goes on behind the flight deck door. Likewise, if there is something you’d like to know, please get in touch using pilotpowling@gmail.com or via one of the “Get In Touch” Buttons on here.
Friday 1st September 2023 to Sunday 3rd September 2023 – Supernumerary Flights
Upon starting with Ryanair, we have 8 sectors (flights) where we’re sat on the flight deck jump seat, observing how the crew operate on a regular flight, something I’ll be doing in only a few days time. In these 8 sectors, I got involved as much as I possible could. I was filling in the ‘paperwork’ as the flight went along, asking questions and taking the radio periodically. All of this was to try and help me prepare for when I would be flying in a few days time, and a little bit less to have to try and learn as I went along. Sitting on the jump seat for the first time, and the first time being in the flight deck of a commercial flight, some of the views out of the window were unlike anything I had seen before! It was an intense couple of days seeing and getting used to what was going on in the flight deck, but I really did love it; what I didn’t love however was the jump seat itself, my goodness was that uncomfortable!
Monday 4th September 2023 – Day 1, Sectors 1 to 4
Starting my flying career with Ryanair in typical Ryanair fashion and completing a 4 sector day – this means 4 flights, 1 full set-up and 3 transit set-ups and not much time to think! My first flight was going to Paris Beauvais in France, which full disclosure is about an hour and a half from the centre of Paris, much like we class Luton as a London airport despite being an hour and a half away too! We boarded the aircraft about 45 minutes before departure, and I got on with my set-up, started the briefs when suddenly the dispatcher appeared at the door. He was delivering the LID which contains our passenger numbers, cargo and any special items we need to be aware of. I remember thinking, “how’ve we got that, we need the passengers onboard first!” I looked over my shoulder and there were 105 passengers facing forwards in their seats! I wasn’t slow or running late, but everything just passed me by in a blur so quickly, and that was the president set for the day. The weather in Paris was beautiful, but to sign me off as being CAT III compliant, we were flying a monitored approach and autoland; this means if on the second sector we had to perform a CAT III landing and autoland, I am now fully qualified to fly it. The minima for a CAT III are 50ft decision height and currently 200m visibility (this will be reduced to 175m soon as I have mentioned previously). After BVA and back to LBA, we then went to Warsaw Modlin in Poland, and as the cruise was slightly longer, this gave time to have a bit of a debrief as to how the day was going and things to look at and work on going forwards. Overall, it was a really good first day, and come the end of the day I was completely knackered unsurprisingly!
Tuesday 5th September 2023 – Day 2, Sectors 5 & 6
To finish off my first week as flying the line as a Ryanair pilot took me down south to Alicante, somewhere I will become rather familiar with in the next coming weeks as I’ll be flying there quite regularly. With it being a longer cruise to ALC, this gave us a chance to talk about what’s going to be happening in the next few weeks, what I can expect from the Line Training Captain’s (LTC’s) and what they can expect from me in return. This also meant that we had some time to talk. through how yesterday went, how I was feeling after it all and also how things were going to work in Alicante when we got there as the approach in is slightly different to what I’ve done before in a jet aircraft. The approach in is what’s called a ‘procedural approach’ meaning we have to follow a set procedure with a track across the ground, maximum speeds and altitudes we need to be at. This then led into how we can fly the aircraft to make it do what we want it to do, rather than the aircraft flying us and we blindly accepting what it thinks is best. All went well and in the 25 minute turnaround in Alicante, meant I got to top up on my tan for a brief few moments!
Monday 11th September 2023 to Monday 25th September 2023 – Sectors 7 to 24
A busy few days on with my flights taking me to Alicante, Barcelona, Dublin, Limoges and Paris, and getting 25 minutes to explore the apron of these places! These days went well and with each flight, I’ becoming quicker in my set-up and turnaround, my briefs are becoming quicker, including more relevant information and as my feedback is saying becoming very close to line standard. There are things I still need to work on of course, and there always will improvements to be made no matter how senior I become with however many hours. But my job is to take the feedback on board, go away on my days off or after a flight or before a flight in the morning, and review, re-learn and come back another day improved in what I wasn’t so good at, then the next time I’m given feedback, I can take this onboard and repeat the process – continuous improvement. The highlight of me for this week was going to Dublin, the flight time is approximately 45 minutes from take-off to landing; we are lifting the wheels off after setting take-off thrust after about 40 seconds or so (weight and performance depending), from approximately 3,000ft where we’re established on the final approach to landing is approximately 3 minutes to 3 and a half minutes, so immediately we’ve got a huge amount of work to do in such a short period of time. To mitigate this, we complete some of the briefs we’d complete in the air on the ground before we take-off, so this meant we had to be even more on the ball getting set-up and sorted so we could brief on the ground. The total block time for Dublin was 56 minutes and 57 minutes respectively – I’ve had longer flights in a Cessna 172 in training in the circuit than these flights!
The highlight coming out of these block of flights is that I am now safety pilot released! For the previous 18 sectors where I’ve been flying, we’ve had a safety pilot on the jump seat, just there in case something were to go wrong and an extra pair of eyes to monitor the conduct of the flight while I was still new and raw to line operations. Now I’ll be flying with just 2 in the flight deck rather than 3; myself and a LTC until I have completed my line training. This also means I’ll start to earn sector pay which I’ll explain how a pilots pay in a future blog.
The plan now going forwards is to carry on with my line training at Leeds Bradford, and continue to carry passengers all across Europe, while continuing to improve, learn more, and develop my skills as I continue to fly and on the ground too. It’s different to being in the sim as when we were in the simulator, we practiced individual items many times including multiple failure, but now we’re on the line, it’s building up the whole picture together. Like having a jigsaw, I have a lot of the sections complete on their own, but now I’m building those completed sections together to be able to reveal the full picture, and the more I fly, the more I’ll be able to bring different elements together to build on my understanding and improve the clarity of the picture I’m building. For those of you who know me well and have ready many of my blogs in the past, you’ll know I’m never happy with my performance. I could do a million and one things correct and bang on the money, but that one tiny little thing that was ever so slightly off par will stand out to me and I’ll work and work until I get it up to a good standard, then working on other elements to improve those further to improve my own performance and understanding.
I’ll be bringing you more blogs from Leeds Bradford airport in the future to explain how I’m progressing with my line training as well as the destinations I’ve been to and any items of interest as well as bringing some discussion items to my blogs so you can understand how the operation works behind the flight deck door. If you happen to be on a flight and hear that your First Officer is myself, please do pop your head round and say hello, albeit for a couple of seconds as I’m sure you’ve found out today I’m going to be very busy! Until next time, take care and I’ll catch you all real soon!
