The best part of conducting flight tests
is when the pilot passes the check. The worst part is when they don’t. I did a
total of three flight checks this week, two for one pilot and one for another,
and both passed. It was a good week!
************
MAF PNG is in the process of adding
Electronic Flight Bags, or EFBs for short, to the equipment pilots carry.
Everybody else knows the devices as iPads, but EFB is the aviationese word for
them.
At their best, they can carry all
necessary documentation, including the aircraft flight manual (a weighty tome),
all the avionics manuals, and every manual, operating procedure, advisory
document, operational memo and so on that any organisation can dream up.
Believe me, MAF is very good at dreaming up manuals and paperwork!
Our EFBs link to our satellite tracking
system, which is one of the best safety improvements MAF has ever invested in
as we know where our aircraft are all of the time. Dream on Air Malaysia and
MH370. With the link comes the ability to send alerts for any emergencies, and
text messages. The latter is hugely useful when it comes to sending information
such as changes of plan, medical evacuations, arrival times, fuel requirements
and load available. Overall, this must be saving us money already.
Additionally, they have the potential
for calculating load data, aircraft weight and balance values, load manifests
and more. But this will have to wait until they have official approval.
There are some teething issues that I’m
sorting out to make them a bit more user friendly.
Firstly, with the mass of manuals and
documents that MAF has, many will never be needed while a pilot is flying, so
to thin down the volume of documents I want to sort out only those that are
necessary to have in an aircraft.
Secondly, working with others we’ll develop
a user-friendly way of renaming the manuals to make them easier to find. For
example, our Twin Otter operating procedures are grandly titled: MPGO.SOP.09 -
DHC6 SOP - Amdt 13 - 10 Aug 2016 –
Print.pdf. I reckon that DHC6 SOP 13 would do just fine! Some negotiation on
renaming may be necessary, but I’m sure a better protocol will be achievable.
The next hurdle to full utilisation is
officialdom. The government Advisory Circular on having EFBs approved is, if I
remember correctly, 52 pages long. The time and energy to drive this project is
more than I can give at the moment, so for the moment we’ll have to settle for
getting rid of some manuals in our aircraft that aren’t legally required, which
at least is a start.
A practical challenge to using iPads is
that periodically Apple, like any other manufacturer, issues updates. The
latest big update came out recently, all 1.15GB of it. I had 15 devices in my
office this week trying to download 1.15GB each over a not very fast internet
connection. I got there in the end and it was a slow process, though obviously
I let them get on with the download and didn’t have to sit watching them.
************
Yesterday a 12.5km run up Rondon Ridge,
followed by some energetic hedge cutting and flower bed digging, left me
sufficiently weary to not want to run again today. I still have an ambition to
make it to the top of Rondon Ridge, 10km from home, and back, without stopping.
I’ve done it once with periodic stretches of walking, but we’ll see if one day
I make it all the way.
************
The garden is beginning to look much
better from the effort I’ve put into it recently. Nicki has done quite a lot of
pruning, including our extremely vicious but very tasty variety of blackberry
cum black raspberry that grows well in our garden. When I say vicious, I mean
vicious! It makes the worst-thorned UK blackberry seem positively benign.
************
I don’t have any flying scheduled for
this week. Two days are tied up with meetings, and the other three will have to
include preparation for pilots’ meetings which are at the start of the
following week. While I’ve kept on top of the organisation of the pilots’
meetings, working with Brad Venter, who’s Crew Training Manager, I haven’t yet done
anything at all for the sessions I’m taking. That will have to change!
Have a good week.
