Page 194 - Demo

190runway approaches we would fly the second as a radar PFL. Up to this point, if you had an engine failure above cloud, ATC would home you to the overhead using direction finding traces on your transmissions and then try and keep you in the overhead as you spiralled down by getting you to transmit for a bearing at each cardinal heading. ATC were good at this, and you would usually break cloud in a position to affect an engine off landing. Obviously, for practice you just throttled back. The problem was that you would break cloud flying at 120 kts which gave you little energy to manoeuvre. And so an alternative system was coming in where ATC would find you on radar and give you a heading to steer for the airfield and a range every mile. We would then home in but aim for a one in one glide path or perhaps one in one plus one. In other words to be at 3000ft at 2 miles etc. This meant that when you broke cloud you would know where you were in relation to the airfield and would be going fast enough to orbit to lose speed and position. It would be quite possible to break cloud at 1000ft and land. And so instead of a Ground Controlled Approach with ATC talking us down, that was what we did. Which was successful and great fun. John signed me up as a CIRE but a couple of days later realised that as I was not an IRE I had not done any ground school at any point. I said that as I was going to have to test people, I was going to have lots of practice at setting questions, which were the same as for an A2 and so I got away with it. Being an Examiner was hard work. You had to be very much up to date on all aspects of the academic syllabus. Each training school had a book which anyone going for any kind of upgrade had to fill in. This would consist of all the questions that the examiner asked and any notes thereof. Consequently you had to have a range of questions prepared that were all different. It wasn%u2019t so bad if you got consecutive candidates from different schools as they did not really compare notes, but if you had 2 from the same school it was a bit of a problem. Of course,whatever you did, you had your favourite topics and these were duly