So it has been over three years since I posted anything at all on my poor, neglected blog.

Far too long. Yes, I think it is time to get back into blogging again. Life is very, very different today to what it was back when I was living in Cairns, wondering if my housemate was an illegal immigrant or not.

The Chronicles of Housemateski

Living in Cairns, the company has put me in an apartment owned by someone somehow connected - and I am sharing with a rather interesting Czech fellow, who has given me a few causes to laugh over the past month or so.

Housemateski escaped from Czechoslovakia during the communist days, but now regularly returns to visit. When I first arrived in Cairns, his Girlfriendski was also living here, but she then embarked on a three week trip to the Czech Republic, leaving poor Housemateski to fend for himself; what was evidently the first time he had had to do so in quite a while.

Girlfriendski is quite a cook, and indeed plied me with Czech dumplings in my first few days here. Yet without her guidance, Housemateski had to learn, and learn quickly. The first day he was alone, I get a knock on my door, and a forlorn question: "How do you turn the oven on?". Fair question, I thought, because some ovens take remarkable calisthenics to operate, although this one here one simply turns on.

A few days later, another forlorn question: "How do you use the washing machine?"

He became reasonably self-sufficient after a while, and was even regularly seen preparing meals. Many garlic cloves were sacrificed to during these efforts. For a while, I was beginning to think he had returned to a normal life, until the day he decided to give himself a haircut. Now, electric clippers are rather simple to use, and even come with handy attachments to select the length of hair you want. So far so good, but apparently when trying to use one on yourself, it's a good idea to turn one's head from side to side, or use two mirrors, to check the progress along the way, and make adjustments if necessary. If you simply stare straight ahead into the mirror, as it appears Housemateski has done, you run the risk of forgetting about the very back of your head, and giving yourself a slightly lopsided mullet... hair short everywhere you passed the clippers, but right at the back, in that part thats quite difficult to reach if you hold your arms a certain way, remains exactly how it was before.

I didn't have the heart to tell him. He was so proud of his new haircut.

My concerns were raised at an offhand comment that indicated his visa had expired a few months previous, but I was later relieved to discover that he has simply changed to a different class of visa, and is perfectly legally resident in Australia.

Girlfriendski returned, sometime over the weekend, and perhaps they were celebrating this evening, with Czech internet radio playing during dinner, but the familiar melody of a particular song struck me as somewhat out of place, when accompanied by the voice of a Czech singer. The song itself was none other than Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, despite being an apparently genuine Czech song. Perhaps over there, they sing Tie Me Herd of Goats Down, Sport...

Though it took a while to get happening, I'm now endorsed on the Cresco, which is a big green plane with a tongue. Getting the next ten hours on type is more of a problem at the moment, because Cairns in the dry season appears to have more rain and low cloud than even Victoria in winter. At least it's not cold!

I need a car. The idea of walking everywhere I need to go is fine for exercise, but it severely limits how far I can actually go, and means I'm relying on lifts for such basic concepts as actually getting to the airport. There is a very nice Legnum I've walked past a couple of times, but it is a little expensive, so I don't think that's a viable option. I'm also not keen on the ancient Volvo parked out the front of my apartment, with a price tag less than the cost of a tank of petrol...

The "plan" at the moment, is to move to Brisbane at the start of next month. This will depend on whether or not the company is ready with the new hairyplane by then - I saw a photo of it today, and it is apparently all ready to go, except for the slight catch that it is in Napier, and it needs to be in Brisbane. (This is progress - it was in Hamilton last time I heard.)

Can't wait.

Things have slowed a little this week, with the tropical winter bringing low cloud and pouring rain for the last two days. At least the temperature is still in the high 20s. Two days running now, despite getting up early (which is hard for me), I've ended up sitting around in the city office until mid morning, then being told the entire day is cancelled.

On the positive side, this has meant I'm able to return to my little burrow instead of hanging around the office, and I have also been able to wander around the town and take some photos.


Here's the lagoon in Cairns - an artificial beach with smooth pool sides on one side, and a shallow sandy slope on the other.



And here's why they have it: the actual beach in Cairns at low tide:

I have somehow found myself in July, with only one post to account for the entire first half of this year.

The first half was productive, getting all my study done, which now means that I shouldnt have to do any more of those exams. This leaves me free for my new job, which is back in Queensland again, and back in the air again! Cairns is lovely at this time of the year, because up here, they think a cold day is 25 degrees. It's not quite as hot as Broome, but considerably more humid.

I've been here just over a week now, and as I write, my housemate has just set fire to something in the kitchen, and the smoke alarm is loud enough to wake up children three blocks away. He is very friendly, but seems to be a little lost in terms of domestic skills since his girlfriend has gone away on holidays for three weeks.

The company here have surprised me greatly by committing to all sorts of things in writing, so I am confident of actually being paid what they said they'd pay me. This makes a change in this particular industry - and hopefully a sign of things to come. The downside is the training program, which is a mere two days off being complete, is dependent on both the weather, and the availability of a certain person - so it looks like later this week. In the meantime, I am being allowed to play with two very nice turboprop aircraft, considerably larger than things I have driven before, and I am indeed enjoying that. The company has two bases, with a third recently purchased, or so I am told, and I'm up in Cairns for the first month to get all my training out of the way and be ready to run the new base from August. Like everything in aviation, I'm not going to get too excited until it actually happens, but my expectation with this company is a little higher than it was with certain other operators.

This post comes to you from 40,000 feet over New South Wales.

I'm sitting down the back of a Virgin 737 on my way back to Melbourne, and thought it high time I posted something new.

Since my last update, I have finished my instrument rating, am half way through completing all my ATPL subjects (which I will need eventually for being able to fly as captain on an aeroplane that needs more than one pilot), and have a low-flying approval in my logbook.

Being instrument rated has opened a whole new world of aviation up – whereas in the past I have had to take great care to remain outside of any clouds, and ensure that all my flying was conducted in good visibility, I now have the capability to fly through and inside clouds, and find my way around the country without actually needing to look for landmarks on the ground to identify my position – that can be accomplished using only the instruments in the cockpit. The advantage to this, obviously, is that weather is far less of a factor in limiting where one is able to fly.

As you may have gathered, I was less than keen to rush back to Broome, after the interesting time I spent there last year, so I began looking elsewhere for work. This really is an industry where the adage about who one knows, rather than what, is the greater factor in finding jobs. My search led me to an aerial survey company, which would involve flying around at an altitude considerably lower than what I am used to – although helicopter pilots are far more comfortable around these levels. However, flying lower than 500 feet above the ground (around 150 metres) requires a specific course of training, and a stamp of approval in my logbook. So back to school I went, for a weekend of flying in circles around a paddock at what I naiively assumed would be 200 or 300 feet off the ground.
Flying low is no different to flying up high, although the optical illusions created by moving so quickly in such close proximity to the ground mean one needs to be aware of what is really happening, for at a low altitude there is far less time available should something not quite go according to plan. 200 feet off the ground at 105 knots (about 220 km/h) gives a far greater feeling of speed than 150 knots at five thousand feet, but has indeed a greater element of fun. But no sooner does one get comfortable at this height, than the friendly bloke sitting next to me took me lower... and lower... until we are no more than 30 feet high – which is about ten metres: barely higher than the poles that hold power lines off the ground.

In any session of flying with an instructor, they will always take great delight in removing all your available engine power at precisely the moment you least expect it. This is, of course, excellent training for the one-in-a-million time when an engine will fail for real while flying – and because pilots train for this, should an engine actually die, there is very little reason that the aeroplane could not make a perfect landing.

So, as all good instructors do, he closed the throttle to simulate an engine failure, while I was heading towards a power line barely higher than the wire itself. Now, contrary to popular fiction, the engine does not keep an aeroplane in the sky. The wings do that. What engines do is allow the aeroplane to get into the sky in the first place, and once there, climb further or maintain height. Without engine power, the aircraft will slowly lose height, and one is then forced to plan a landing somewhat earlier than otherwise desired. But aircraft still keep travelling forwards during this descent – an airliner in the cruise will easily glide four hundred kilometres before reaching the ground – and in my situation, I was faced with a power line in front of me, and slightly below my aircraft. Precisely where I would find myself in a few seconds, if I didn't do anything.

There being a large enough gap underneath the line, I decided to go for that, instead, and pushed the aircraft down a little steeper, clearing the line with a large margin to spare, upon which the ever-friendly instructor let me have engine power back again, allowing me to climb away.

As this all happened rather quickly, I mentioned to the instructor that that particular moment had increased my heart rate a little, and I queried whether or not I had indeed done the right thing.

He laughed, and made me fly underneath the same power line twenty more times, to ensure I was comfortable in doing so.

Nevertheless, I completed the approval and am now permitted to fly below 500 feet when required. All that was to remain was the call from my new boss advising me on when I would need to present myself in Perth to start this job. While waiting, I resumed study, filling in the time trying to complete the seven exams required to upgrade my licence from a Commerical to Airline Transport. As I mentioned before, I'll need this eventually, although not in the immediate future. The ground school classroom in Melbourne is one of the two best places in Australia to study for these exams, and I have always been very pleased with the quality of the education received there. However, after two of the seven subjects completed, the fact that courses usually ran when they said they would began to wear thin, and I have spent the last week in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast – the location of the other best place in Australia – plugging through yet another one of these exams.

While it's true that time flies when you're having fun, it is also true that time's fun when you're flying.

It's been over a month since I arrived in Melbourne, and a very busy month it has been indeed. The first two weeks, studying every day for the Instrument Rating EXam (IREX), passed reasonably sedately, and I'm pleased to be able to say that after two weeks full time study, I was able to pass the exam on my first go. I'm sure doing the full-time classroom study was the best way to do this, because while I'm sure it would be possible to glean all the information you need from a textbook, there's no way a textbook can cover the material in the way a good human teacher can. And this teacher is by reputation, one of the two best aviation teachers in Australia.

Having completed this exam, I was able to fully relax and enjoy Fergus and Miranda's wedding earlier this month, at a lovely vinyard somewhere in the vicinity of Brisbane. It was a great evening, with great fun had by all, and as you'd expect with these two, a great many laughs. Also great was the chance to catch up with former Sale people, many of whom I hadn't seen in years. The Yarra Valley is a lovely and picturesque part of Victoria, and it is a shame I have no idea where it is.

But fun and frivolity only lasts so long, and it was back to Melbourne to start the next phase of the training - the flying component of the Instrument Rating. So as not to make it too hard right from the start, the first few days were flown in a simulator - a nice cosy little box in a room, but in a nice first, experience in the simulator actually counts as time in my logbook! Over the course of a week, I was able to fly all around Australia without ever leaving that little box in the room.

After a few IFR flights in the venerable Piper Arrow, to get back into the swing of things, particularly since it had been over two months since I flew anything at all, I had the great pleasure a couple of days ago of flying a twin-engined aircraft for the very first time. While the instructor keeps reminding me it is so much faster than anything I've flown before, it's actually no faster, indeed a tad slower than the Cessna 210, but it does have a much better rate of climb, and far better equipped an instrument panel! I'm starting to get a feel for the aeroplane, and am learning it's little quirks, though I haven't done any operations with only one engine working quite yet.

It seems the fun stuff is still to come, on that count!

Once this rating is done, I'll be in Sale for Christmas, then hopefully able to find another flying job in the not-too-distant future. The regular job-ad website is still frequently showing light single and light twin jobs all over Australia, I had an interesting post-script to a conversation I had earlier in the year with the Ops Manager of a certain international airline, which might turn out to be rather positive, but I can't get too hopeful. Shall keep you posted, though.

On a completely different topic, I've been working for the Electoral Commission over this little event we've had in Australia lately, the federal election. In 2004 also,