Global Aviator South Africa - May 2018

4 Vol. 10 / No. 5 / May 2018 Global Aviator

In one's airline career

the monotony of

pressing an autopilot

button and monitoring

systems for the next

several hours is fairly

tedious and the tendency

to regress somewhat in

your personal flying skill

is raised markedly.

I have flown with many GA

pilots who are exceptional with

their hands yet awful at situational

awareness and recognising risk

thereby analysing and dealing with

a threat. Conversely, I’ve flown with

many an airline fellow and had quite

the opposite, a highly professional

regard for getting someone else’s large

and expensive machine from A to B,

sometimes C, yet just plain average

once the autopilot is disconnected.

A great many of my friends of

the same training era are now flying

with multi-national airlines and most

of them on heavy jets, each having

followed separate and different paths

to the same goal, however. All of them

are highly specialised and can operate

their respective vehicles efficiently

and safely, the primary requirement

of the airline and passengers.

Not all of them are GA current

any longer and with that, I wonder

how their personal flying prowess

has either suffered or improved?

As it was to happen, my good

friend Jason arrived in Cape Town

on an overnight with his airline. He

normally comes to stay and we catch

up over a steak, talking rugby and

fishing, you know how it goes. This

time was to be slightly different in that

I mentioned to Jay that there was a

club outing to Saldanha on Saturday

and would he like to go. He was very

excited and hence we awoke early the

next morning to pre-flight the Yak.

Now Jason has a long pedigree

in GA having flown Cessna 210’s for

many hours on overnight bank runs

between wherever and somewhere

else. He has also flown myriad other

light machines which means his basic

skills should still be good, there is also

legend that this gent has a great pair

of hands anyway. He has however,

worked for two major airlines and as

we all know they love to knock the

flying out of you in order to better

train a systems manager to accomplish

a safe line flight in accordance with

the SOP they provide. It had been ages

since Jay has flown a light aircraft and

his vim to get going was palpable.

I explained the start sequence

to him which in the Yak makes

provision for pilots with eight hands,

Saldanha

Run

Above: Richard Browne (left) and Jason Davey in Yak 18T on their way to the

Saldanha breakfast fly-in.

Flying In Africa

By Richard Browne