I've now had a good two months worth of experiencing the well oiled machine that is Flight Operations. After a good six months of living with Ground-school five days a week and seeing it's relatively sleek and dynamic operation hopes were high for what flying would be like.
Turns out that Ops leaves a lot to be desired. It's difficult to coordinate so many students and instructors, each capable of different things and at varying stages of training, with the ever changing and forever unpredictable weather. Recently we've been suffering from the effects of a local weather phenomenon called the Levanter which happens every year around this time of year. It's a very strong easterly wind that tends to put a dampener on our operations as it blows about 90° to our runway. Last week someone decided it was time to put us into full time flying. It just so happened that this was the week that the Levanter settled in and I managed very little flying. But such is the way. However the weather is starting to get on my nerves, but I guess that's the price we pay for entering an industry that's so weather dependant.
I've been trying to knock off some solo flights which is made difficult by the strict restraints on when I'm allowed to fly solo. This weather is totally unsuitable for it, and the incompetence of Spanish ATC doesn't alleviate the situation.
This post was originally titled "Communication" as I was to rant about the lack of communication between anyone these days. In our supposedly 'superconnected' society everything seems amazingly disconnected. It's entirely possible that this is just the result of suddenly being so well connected that seeing anything that isn't perfectly in sync seems weird and alien, but I think we're just getting lazy. Ops has a tough time scheduling everyone, but they coordinate surprisingly little with Ground-school, there is plenty of potential to become more flexible in the times allocated and get more people flying and putting them in Ground-school on bad-weather days.
This lack of communication isn't just prevalent in that case, there's also management and how they communicate with the students and the other departments. It can also be scaled up to problems within government and local councils coordinating with each other, departments helping one another out. Yet all we get is the mess left over from the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.
That was going to be a rant, heh, but I'm too tired and not thinking very clearly at all, yet I wanted to post *something*, so we'll leave it at that.
