Water bill, bank statement insurance, no idea, banks something oh that one's
interesting. Thank you Qantas I'll open that in a second. The worst bit of mail
that any pilot can receive. I don't know whether you subscribe to this. I know we're
using electronic flight bags but this is the air services update to the
departure and approach plates for IFR. I don't know I don't know why I still get
the paper versions. Anyway what you have to do every time is open this up open the
second bag. Why are there two bags? Hang on. So here
is my guide to what I do when you have to update your departure and approach
plates. Number one take the ridiculous amount of plastic off throw on the
ground. Check if the page is updated and find the pages which have changed.
Albury, great. Take these two pages put the other massive pack down. Don't get
those out of order because you'll be in... Step two, find the corresponding airport
in your current version.
Step 3 once you've found the airport find the actual chart that's changed because
they don't give you the whole airport no no just the specific pages that have
changed. Step 4 remove the old
important point do not get old charts confuse with new
charts. Place new chart in binder. Step 5 close binder and repeat 5 million
times. By the time you're finished your floor should look like your bedroom
floor when you were a 16 year old. God electronic flight bags are
definitely the future okay we're supposed to be flying today however.
The weather today is not really what we were expecting. Ah, all right we might need a change of location here.
Look at the, ants they're on my shoe my shoe they're on my shoe. Yuck I was
going to stop there becuase you get a good view of the sky but those ants were, yuck. I hate ants.
So yes the weather had very different ideas. I don't know whether you
can hear me over this wind as well but this is kind of a bit of the problem.
So the idea today was to take tango Delta Sierra up for a quick practice
flight and then I was going to take a friend of mine actually a work colleague
flying this afternoon. We were going to go and do the Melbourne City orbits it's
low level so you do the whole thing at about one and a half thousand feet. So on
days like this when you've got a bit of wind you're going to get some turbulence
down low. There's a severe turbulence warning at Melbourne Airport at the
moment the International Airport and there's moderate to severe turbulence
warnings in Moorabbin as well. So it's not much fun. Now this is a really
important part of life as a private pilot because you're going to get your
license and people are going to start asking you if they can go for rides
believe me it happens all the time. But when you've got a time constraint
this is when it can become a little bit dangerous because the temptation is to
think well I have to do the flight at that time if I don't it's never going to
happen. They're relying on me I'm the pilot I should be able to be fly, it'd
be fine. But this is where you actually need to be the pilot be the pilot in
command and start making those difficult decisions and that's kind of what I had
to do today. So this is how I made the decision so I was looking at the weather
I'm gonna sit down in the grass. I'll give you a quick bit of background on the
actual the way that I plan a flight when it comes to weather. I've I think
four stages. First one is about seven days before I want to fly I check the
long-range weather I use a you know Google weather, Weatherzone,
whatever app you kind of like using for generic weather and I just checked
roughly what I think it's looking like. So if there's a big sunshine on the day
you're probably okay if there's a big thundercloud on the day... Then secondly
four days out I jump on to the Bureau of Meteorology
website and I pull up the four day synoptic chart. At that point if there's
you know isobars are well spaced or big high
pressure sitting over you just think yeah do you know what though we should
be alright. If there's thin isobars fronts coming through troughs all that
kind of thing then I start to think oh maybe we might need to look at shifting
the date a little. The day before the flight now this is a good trick my
instructor taught me is that here in Melbourne we can use the Melbourne
International Airport that's Tullamarine over in that direction. Their weather it
comes out 36 hours in advance. So the day before you're flying you can actually
check Melbourne's TAF and get a pretty good indication of what's happening here
at Moorabbin. If you fly from Arab in for it Bankstown check the Sydney one. Then
on the actual day of the flight then that's when you do your normal weather
checks you check your local TAF you check the area forecast all that kind of
thing. But my point is you can get a pretty good indication of the weather
quite a long way out and it's good to get into that habit. But the best thing
you can do as a pilot when you're flying with passengers is try and set their
expectations. If you know seven days out that there's probably a 50/50 chance of
thunderstorms coming in you can prepare contingencies. If you know four days out
there's maybe an 80/20 chance of thunderstorms again you can do that. And
if the day before you're pretty certain you've got storms the next day then
don't bloody fly, go to the pub.
Right I'm going to head back home now before the rain comes in. I hope that was useful I just wanted to share
some of my thoughts about weather and planning I don't want to get too much into the
details of planning with this channel but I do want to get into a bit of the
background of your responsibilities as a pilot and I just try to give you some
tricks of what you can do, try and make your life as a pilot a little bit easier
and safer for yourself and your passengers all round. So I hope you
found that useful give us a thumbs up if you did if you haven't subscribed yet
don't forget to subscribe but yes thanks for watching guys travel safe I'll catch
you again soon. Here comes the storm.
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