Christmas and New Year in the Summer...?

It's been a little while since I blogged, mainly for two reasons. Firstly, December was a fairly busy month for flying, and secondly I had a special Christmas visitor.


Flying progressed well during the last month. Hopefully after tomorrow, the General Handling Phase will be finished and I'll be moving onto Navigation. General Handling involves doing various manoeuvres including Stalls, Practice Forced Landings, and Steep Turns. The last flights have also introduced us to the wonders of Instrument Flying, giving a taster of what lies ahead on bigger and faster aircraft. After tomorrow, I will have 12 flights left until my PPL test, and following successful completion will move onto the Single Engine Wings Phase, where we do 36 flights building our hours, and learning to fly the aircraft to more stringent limits than for the PPL standard.

The second reason, as I mentioned earlier, was that I had a special Christmas present which arrived at Auckland International Airport from Manchester, via London Heathrow, Los Angeles and Sydney and 10 hours later than British Airways had promised. A delay to the flight out of London basically meant a missed connection in LA and the detour via Sydney. Must have been quite frustrating to know that you've just flown past your destination, and it will be 6 hours flying to get back there.

Still, after the initial hiccup, Charlie and I both had a great time, doing a number of day trips out to see some of the sights of the North Island, including places with lots of water as you can see from the photo above. Christmas Day was spent at Clearways where we cooked a roast dinner. Unfortunately, I had a bit too much Bucks Fizz for Breakfast, and ended up walking into a door, resulting in a cut head.

Other highlights included a visit to the Hot Spas in Te Aroha and Taupo, going down the Luge at Rotorua, asking some passing sheep for directions, and doing our own version of the World Rally Championships, on some of New Zealand's 'finest' roads....

It was very difficult saying goodbye at Auckland Airport last week, knowing that it will be 3 months until we see each other again. Still, the first 3 months out here went very quickly, so I expect the next three will do the same.

New Year's Eve was spent in Auckland with Daz and Paul, doing a Pub Crawl from midday to midnight. The head was a little sore the next day, but luckily we had 2 days to recover before being back to work, and back into the sky.

Hopefully my next entry will be to tell you I have my PPL in 3 weeks. Watch this space...