Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Uniform or Umbrella?

I'm writing this in February (when I'm taking the ground school), and my first 5 flights were last summer, so the first blog entries are going to involve a little bit of time-warping until I finally get caught up.

In last week's ground school we covered radio work. The aerodrome where I've flown is uncontrolled, so there is no chatter to the tower because there is no tower. However, we have a radio in each glider, in the tow plane, and one at the shack where we do the paperwork and figure out who is going up next, so the radio is in active use. Each glider announces when they enter the circuit, as does the towplane when entering the circuit, backtracking on the runway, etc.

The other use of the radio is to call the shack when you've been up for an hour in one of the club-owned gliders.... if there is someone waiting for the ship then you have to come down (club rule), but if there is no waiting list then you can continue flying.

And so we learned about nine vs. niner, and the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, etc). Constant practice is necessary... I find that expressing car license plates works well when stuck in rush hour.

www.liveatc.net allows you to listen to ATC - someone living near an airport has hooked up a radio scanner to their computer and fed the audio to this website, who then feed it to you. You'll notice there is no idle chatter, and the efficiency of the communication.

Back to reading license plates. And trying to remember that it's Uniform, not Umbrella.

The radio operator's exam is at the last night of the ground school.

1 comment:

Aviatrix said...

I've heard a student say "underwear." After a few repetitions, the tower started using "underwear" too, for her.

And a former colleague of mine uses "unicorn," just to see if anyone is listening.

I told the student to picture pilots in their uniforms, but she said she'd much rather picture them in their underwear.