I had some homework to do and I totally forgot… but we corrected it all together 😉
Good, now I know how to use the flight computer. I bit tricky indeed but is all about habit (as almost everything in life-practice, practice-). Our professor is very friendly and he knows what he’s talking about; sometimes he even drops some pretty good jokes. This day, he taught us more useful things. Like, calculating flight time, traveled distance, Speed, etc. I would say that it seems annoying but then again, it’s so useful to know such things!
We learned how important is to be sure we have enough fuel… you might think I’m just getting into a dummy area by pointing out such necessity; but another thing we learned is that we should never underestimate the fuel consumption. The first thing that comes to our mind when talking about fuel is our experience with automobiles… see, the different in between cars and airplanes is that the car won’t fall from the sky if the fuel finishes… you know what I mean. Unfortunately we had some bad news a couple of weeks ago of two pilots that should have declare Mayday, but instead they decided to continue with “the reserves” and well, they aren’t longer with us L.
Another useful calculation; we learned how to calculate the flight remaining time according to fuel. In case we ever need it (I don’t wish such need to anyone of course). Now, all these it depends on the type of plane you are flying.
In the continuation of the Navigation… we got a fancy introduction to “Orientation” and compass Rose. I started feeling as Lara Croft sort of saying… In this orientation topic, we had a briefing to the Earth magnetic fields and how it affects the trajectory of the flight. Did you know that there are two Norths? (What??!!) … One is the True North and the other one is the Magnetic North. The TN is according to the Pole charts and the MN is where the Earth magnetics variates (we need to stay up to date with this information, since it changes…). This is getting cool right! J
Drums//// => While in the middle of the class; I couldn’t avoid thinking about my Earthquakes theory “The Rebound” which is the discovery of an earthquake pattern. See, our teacher continue talking and I literally stopped following him. I got my phone and wrote my ideas down…. Magnetic pollution?; exactly. It’s all connected. If you see the Magnetic Model charts; there’s no way you miss how the isogonals are the main track of any wave and in the same way they intervene with the orientation of planes, they can intervene with the orientation of quakes.
More things to consider when Navigating is the wind drift. Probably you remember the film Tokyo Drift; where our adrenaline goes high when seeing those cars drifting and in some cases crashing… now, can you imagine the drifting trajectory of a plane? And we need to calculate that too!
In the last post, I mentioned that I believe we should integrate some of this in school. Now, I’m sure is a must. Educational vision is important when reaching our future generation.
LIDIA AVILES 