Hangar Night
Last night was hangar night. Basically, the class goes out to the maintenance ramp where an aircraft has been set aside for our use. Over the course of three hours we: did a pre-flight walk around inspection, inspected the avionics bay and aft equipment bay.
After all of the exterior activities were complete, it was time to open up the main cabin door and climb aboard. My sim partner and I were the first aboard and that meant we were tasked with doing the flight compartment safety check and firing up the APU. I've done it over 50 times in the simulator, but doing it for the first time in the actual aircraft was a little unnerving. If you do it wrong in the sim, the instructor has you do it again. If you do it wrong in the aircraft, it just might destroy a one million dollar APU.
It's amazing how accurate simulators are. When the battery master is flipped in the plane, it sounded just the way I expected it to. I love seeing the displays light up like Times Square. After doing the safety check and the APU start flow, it was time to press the APU START switch light. I love the way an APU sounds when it's firing up and it was especially gratifying to hear it from the cockpit for the very first time. This may sound corny, but I will never forget it.
The rest of the evening was spent practicing opening the emergency exits, learning the locations of all of the emergency equipment, opening and closing the main cabin door and galley service door, the crew escape hatch in the cockpit plus a few other things. It was a fun night.
In the cockpit getting ready to start the APU
1 comment:
Where is the cupholder? Haha!
I crack me up.
It looks like it was a fun night!
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