Waiting on Standby!

A short, 3 day tour last week with just 3 flights; Dundee to London, then caught an airline to Casablanca to pick up another aircraft to fly to Biarritz, and then onto London again. Nothing exciting, except for trying to arrange transport for one from Casablanca airport to the hotel after my arrival late at night - I really must learn French or Arabic one of these days!

I am now sat at home on standby for day one of my forthcoming 6 day tour. However, there would appear to be a few aircraft in maintenance and lots of crews available so I could be waiting at home for a while! The only point in my favour is that I have to carry out my yearly line check, so I should get to fly at least twice on this tour.

Free icecream and the grumpy parrot!

After transferring to another aircraft in Paris, we flew to Moscow yesterday. Great weather all over Europe so it was a relaxed flight, with time to enjoy the great crew food from Le Bourget. The day was only marred by the work in progress at Vnukovo Airport, which only has the north/south runway to land on at the moment, with an NDB approach and a massive hump in the runway which gives some very interesting visual cues! With the usual impossible air traffic requests and delayed descents, the approach and landing into Moscow was difficult to say the least!  Thank goodness for a good VMC day!

Left Moscow after an overnight for Bromma airport, Stockholm. Again a perfect flying day and a beautiful approach into Stockholm over the thousands of islands. The best part about flying into Bromma, apart from the views, is the free icecream at the Graffair FBO. They also have a parrot roaming freely, but he gets grumpy with the pilots - he only fancies the flight attendants!

Stuck in Basel!

I was due to fly an aircraft from maintenance at Basel to carry out a further flight from Geneva. However, we experienced a minor equipment failure during the takeoff roll which meant a quick return to Basel. Total airborne time was 18 minutes which is not quite the flight time I was hoping for today! Still, the engineer has assurred us that the aircraft will be ready (again) after a few hours so we wait for the paperwork to be finished. Hopefully, the next time we apply full power we will be able to continue! It was good to get back in the air after what feels like a long ground period, but I did feel a little behind the aircraft so I am glad my colleague was the handling pilot!

The reason that nothing has been posted in this section for a while is that I've been busy!  Not a very good excuse I know, but I have been doing a lot a teaching and a lot of flying.  This site was something to do whilst on standbys in hotels, but since I started it I havn't had any! - just minimum rest and long days!  Such is the life of a bizjet pilot!

What's New?

I have added to quite a few of the equipment sections in the side bar.  There is a photo (not brilliant as it was taken on a cameraphone) under 'Fire Extinguishers' of a HALON extinguisher in use.  I could not find one at all on the web, so that's why we took one ourselves.  It clearly shows the stream of gas from the extinguisher, and the distance you should be away from the fire.

The 'Emergency Locator Transmitter' section shows the Falcon ELT.  It's easy to access the ELT on larger bizjets but trying to get photos of the ELTs on a Hawker or Cessna is a little more problematic.  I will have to wait to go to a maintenance base before I get those.  The section also gives links to how the COSPAS SARSAT system works - basically how your ELT will save your life.

'Emergency Evacuation' and 'Fire Fighting' are now populated (check the left side bar).  I have also added posts to 'Fire axes', 'Protective Breathing Equipment', 'Torches' and 'First Aid Kits'.

Please take a look and email me to let me know what you think.

Welcome to a site dedicated to Aviation Professionals!

This site detail the types of, and how to use the safety equipment generally found on board Business Aviation aircraft (Bizjets!).  As an instructor in 'Safety Equipment and Emergency Procedures' I have spent many hours trawling the net to find information and pictures on the various bits of equipment I teach about, but mostly to no avail!

There is no one location where all the information is to hand, which is why I have founded this site - it is basically a place to store all the information I come across in my research, and also allow fellow aviation professionals access to it at the same time.

If you have done your own searches, you will find few accessible pictures and videos of safety equipment to be found on the web, and I hope to amend this by posting some of the pictures of the equipment that I have taken, and making them available as Training Resources to other flight crew members and instructors.

Update on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 8:14PM by David Williams

I have now started populating the site and the equipment pages are developing. It is taking time because we are still in the middle of the busy season and my main job is taking a lot of time. However, I do feel that in just creating the site, and populating it with what I have done so far, I have begun to pay more attention to equipment and procedures on my own aircraft! I now look at the jet as a whole, and try to come up with the reason of why a piece of safety equipment was placed where it is by our engineers or the manufacturer.