Mike's Flying

Well, today was anything but normal.

In no particular order:

• Watched from up close as firetrucks extinguished some burning wreckage
• Broke my leg
• Didn’t speak spanish to spanish medical professionals
• Laid on a plastic sheet on the pan for 40 minutes
• Spoke even less spanish to spanish medical professionals
• Was dragged to my feet
• Effected a miraclous recovery of my stricken leg
• Proceeded to watch an Air Berlin flight get pushed back away from the terminal building
• Was refused entry to the airport for about 3 hours
• Eventually met up with my parents, who proceeeded to teach me Meterology

If that’s not a strange day, I’m not sure what is.

Ok, ok, I’ll tell the whole story.

On Monday the student body was informed that the airport was due to be checked on it’s disaster response. This involves testing the fire service, airport security, and the medical teams simulteanously. In essence, a crash of reasonable magnitude is simulated. As a (boradly) non-spanish speaking group of people the students of FTE were offered the chance to star as the passengers and crew of ‘Fenix 08′ a doomed Embraer 95 suffering from a catastrophic landing gear failure.

Sounds interesting, eh? We were briefed on the proceedings fairly loosely on Tuesday. We were each given the injuries we were to effect and told roughly what would be happening. The simuation was to be as realistic as could be managed so a full paramedic response, including heli-med was planned. Among the injuries were a couple with brain damage, burns victims including someone with 45% 2nd degree burns, two broken legs (of which I was one), a broken arm, and a multitude of people with cuts and grazes.

So this morning we all trooped out to the pan (cleared of aircraft for the exercise) and watched as they set up a small fire to play with.

The fire from the 'wreckage' of the Embraer

Dousing the flames with foam from the Monitor

After this we had to run to our places and begin being the loudest, awkardest and most distraught bunch of air crash victims we could manage. We had specific instructions to be as trying as possible, it was a test after all. Several of the less-injured satrted wandering off in random directions, whereas the less mobile of us waited for the medical teams to arrive and start the ardous task of processing us all.

The tags we were given denoting injury and severity - yes the top stripe is 'dead'

When they did arrive, we were all given a tag with tear-off strips (the more strips torn off, the worse the tagee’s situation) and a small diagram marking the position and type of injury we had sustained. After this they sorted us into three groups based on the seriousness of our condition, and we were moved and laid on tarpaulins in these groups. Up to this point, everything had gone like clockwork (though one is reminded that the spanish for ‘punctual’ is ‘add 20 minutes’ ).

However, at this point we started to notice the exercise begin to descend into the barely-organised chaos one expects from these drills. The seriously-injured were cared for, wrapped up, treated and shipped off in ambulances and helicopters. The uninjured and the cuts and bruises lot were quickly and efficently gathered and packed off to the terminal to be processed over there. The omission being those of us with moderate injuries. We lay on our tarpaulin for best part of 40 minutes before even a blanket was brought out way. Our names were taken and we were assessed, but a full hour after the accident (after they had erected an emergency hospital tent, and cleared the area of all the other casualities, no less). We were given drips (including a paramedic to stand over us and hold the bottles), and eventually I was even furnished with oxygen.

Slowly, one by one, some of us were stretchered off into the tent. Roughly 90 minutes after we first lay down, I was about to be seen to properly. The chap came up to me, grabed me under the arm and aided me to stand up (cue dramatic ‘my leg is f***ing broken, I can’t walk’ theatrics). He wasn’t having any of it. “No, no! simulation end! over! bomba, real!” were his words.

A bomb scare in the terminal building. A real one. In a moment my leg was fixed and I was dumped inside the hospital-tent with the other semi-injureds. After a few minutes it was obvious that the exercise wasn’t going to resume, so we headed back into FTE. There was three of us, we wandered about looking for the others, but we couldn’t find them. We decided that they were probally over by the terminal building and so we decided to head over that way. At this point we were still uncertian for the reason for the termination of the exercise. Apart from the guy who spoke to me all they would tell us was that the exercise was over because there was a ‘problem’. We walked towards the terminal building, and straight past the police cordon, road block and more than a couple of the ‘Guarda Civil’. Indeed, it was only when we turned round to ask one of them what was up that they seemed to notice us and promptly told us quite frimly that we were not to go near the terminal.

We watched as an Air Berlin flight was evaquated, and the passengers moved away from both the terminal and the aircraft. We watched them push the aircraft away from the building, and we spotted the bus full of our fellow students sat on a taxiway. Poor souls.

That, I believe is all the jucy stuff. Now I’m due down the bar, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see you all anon.

Well, my week 9 exams are officially over

I was really pleased with some results, but others were far too close to the wire for comfort. The scores roll out thus:

• Meterology: 77%
• Principals of Flight: 94%
• Engines: 97%
• Electrics: 94%
• Systems: 94%
• Instruments: 88%
• Radio Nav: 88%
• General Nav: 77%

• Average: 88.6%

I wasn’t very happy with either of my Met or General Nav scores simply because of the number of silly, mindless mistakes made in each. But on the up side I have passed all the exams, and I did beat the 85% average that CityFlyer ask for. Not that these scores get passed along anyway, they’ll get marked down as a Pass or a Fail on my report and nothing else.

Still, they’re out of the way and now it’s back to normal classes for the last week before christmas

Well, time moves on and I’ve decided to write about the biggest project I’ll be undertaking in my new-found position on the Student Committee as the IT guy.

We (the students) have an intranet site – available only from within FTE – upon which news, information and events are posted. Also to be found on this intranet site are the Flying and Ground-school programmes, and a set of discussion forums.

This is all very well and good, and as a site it functions quite well. However, there are a few major changes it has had to undergo in order to show the timetables, and as features have been added (TV room booking, suggestion boxes, Online CRP-5′s…) it has become rather cluttered and a rather nasty, hacked site to attempt to administer.

I was perusing the massed jumble of files and the crumpled mess of a database and A thought struck me. Currently any information I might want as regards my flying schedule is a whole 15 or so clicks away from the information I want about being able to book the minibus for a trip into town. What if I could log into the site and it straight away told me what classes I have today/tomorrow/the rest of the week, or what days and what times I’m flying for the rest of the week? What if, if I wanted to book the TV room, I merely had to go and select the times I wanted and say what programme it was for? What if, if I want to book the minibus, all I have to do is provide the reason, times, and a contact number. If I was banned from the minibus, I wouldn’t be able to book it.

The login’s for this wonder-site could also tie-in with people’s logins to the forums.

This was my idea, and at first glance it looks an almost insurmountable task. Basically, I want to write my own mini-facebook.

I decided that this was feasable at the last comittee meeting, where we discussed what ough to go into such a system, and if such a development task was even possible. It was decided that I should at least try to get a system out there to replace the now clunking and slow intranet Site.

The name:

Well, the committee also goes by the name of the Jerez Entertainment Team, and the current site is called JET Online (with the forums being called JETblast). In line with this tradition My wonder-site will go by the name of MyJET.

Posts in this category will cover the project, from basic design to the more intricate details of the coding problems involved. I expect it will get rather technical at times.

Feel free to follow along with me as I attempt the task (don’t worry, normal blogging will continue!)

Mike out.

Well, I’ve been intending to make some hefty changes to the blog for a while now. I’ve finally got them all completed.

Under the hood we’re now on WordPress version 2.7 (yippie!), with some little tweaks for my benefit (google analytics, pageview counter, and a few others).

On the face of things you shouldn’t notice many changes to the look of the site, though load times should now be greatly improved. However, there have been some major changes to the way the site is run, and the way one navigates around.

Gone are the tabs at the top – all my posts from now on will be just that. Posts to this front page. So no more clicking on the tab to get the page for the week, just read the latest post on the front page

The posts are broken into categories, so that if you’re particually interested in looking at the photos of aircraft I’ve posted you can click on ‘Aircraft’ under ‘Photos’ in the categories menu on the left. This is more in line with how wordpress is supposed to be used.

The search has also undergone an overhaul, with many more tags and much more content being indexed. So if you want to find a specific post but it’s been archived (over 2 weeks old) then the search is your friend. That or the ‘Archives’ menu on the right

The changes also make adding content to the blog a lot easier for me, so you can expect more frequent, (though possibly shorter) updates.

Happy reading!

- Mike

Firstly, I apologise for the tardy-ness of these latest posts. Suffice to say that my time has become slightly more precious over the last few weeks.

When you’re at FTE they bandy around the phrase ‘Getting out of the Blue Gates’.

The Blue gates are a pair of large sliding gates across the main entrance that echo back to the old military ownership of the site that now houses FTE. From these rather over-engineered fortifications many phrases have sprung, including (amongst others) ‘Blue Gate Syndrome’ and ‘Getting out of the Blue gates’.

In order to avoid going steadily crazy and referring to yourself as King Rabbit XII (Blue-Gate syndrome), students are advised that at least once a week we must find ourselves an excuse to get outside of the Blue gates and remember that there is an outside world.

Now, in the south of Spain where does go to sample the local culture? The mountains around Grazalema? The Gorges and bridges of Rhonda? The streets of Sevilla? The Bodegas of Jerez? The choice is fantastic, and the countryside as quintessentially Spanish as one could hope it to get.

It is thus that we find ourselves heading to Gibraltar for a fine Saturday out.

How we can expect to mingle with the locals when there’s British land within 60miles? Inconceivable, the old empirical blood runs strong. So, course 81 planned a road trip. 3 cars were hired (at an astonishing rate of €35 for 3 days). 3 cars were filled with 13 bodies and the lot of us high-tailed it down to Gib for real fish and chips, real beer and monkeys.

Awesome.

Gibraltar is a strange place. One arrives by driving over (yes over) the Runway at Gibraltar airport in a flagrant mockery of all the perimeter security at pretty much every other airport worldwide. The first port of call after parking up (at Morrison’s, no less) is to find real Fish and Chips. The canteen at FTE isn’t that bad, but it does have a habit of pumping out fairly generic quazi-english meals that can become somewhat testing after a while. Proper Fish and Chips is a good cure, and that is only found in Gibraltar.

Once fed, we’re able to take stock of the surroundings; the place is very crowded, with High-rise flats nesting next to crumbling fortress walls, shops built into old gun emplacements, and general bustle all around. The whole place is almost British, but only enough to be rather eerie in effect. Marks and Spencer, Subway, Morrison’s and a few other big names can all be found on the rock and the effect of the ‘We’re British!, We really are!’ angle on almost everything is rather overwhelming.

Still, the small territory serves many purposes. So the next stop is to stock up on our Duty-free. Even if one doesn’t smoke, common courtesy is to offer your allowance of cigarettes to somebody who does. Strangely, the alcohol allowance is a closely held personal right, and very rarely traded.

Nipping into one of the many off-licences procures the necessary goods and after stowing them in the cars we can head off to the main attraction. Monkeys! Well, technically Apes, but forgive me my childish enthusiasm for monkeys.

Well, it’s time for me to make a shy confession. I’ve actually managed to get down to Gibraltar twice since I’ve been here. It’s lucky really, seeing as the day the course made the trip as a whole the cable-car up the rock was broken and we faced paying for a tour or driving up (a few of us did drive up, but the monkey photos I have are from an earlier trip I made with a group from course 80). After seeing (or not seeing depending on the trip) the Apes, we headed back down to Morison’s and promptly stocked up on British goodies not readily available in Jerez. Feather Pillows, proper tea, cuppa-soups, extra-strong mints, magazines and other such items that make FTE life that much more bearable.

So, we stock up on goodies, load the cars, pile back in and start the trip home. Back through the blue gates and into another week of life at FTE.