This is your first step to a career as a professional pilot !
If you are 17 years of age you qualify to obtain a Private Pilot License. As a private pilot you can fly aircraft which you are type-rated for. The privileges of this licence allows you to fly friends and family,with you as the pilot-in-command.
The course could be followed either on a full-time or part-time basis. Skyline also conducts an exclusive PPL program for business executives and those employed in other full-time activities.
Your Private Pilot License forms the foundation for advanced commercial and professional licenses.
Main aspects of the course :
- Solo-flight: Once the instructor is confident that you are familiar with the aircraft and can handle it independently, you will be prepared for your solo flight. This usually consists of a few take-offs and landings in the airport traffic pattern.
- Aerial Manoeuvres: After your initial solo flight, you will be allowed to practice aerial maneuvers on your own within close proximity to the airport where you would be training at.
- Cross-country navigation: After your first few solo flights, training moves onto cross-country navigation. You learn various elements of flight planning and navigation by reference to checkpoints on the ground. You and your instructor will go on several cross-country flights to help hone these skills.
- Solo cross-country flight: When you are confident of operating the aircraft by yourself without assistance from the instructor, you will be certified by the academy for solo cross-country flight. You then have a few solo cross-country flights to build time as well as confidence in your abilities.
- Emergency procedures: As part of the training, you will also learn emergency procedures like engine failures, loss of radio communications, and inadvertent flight into poor weather or clouds.
- Night-flight rating: If a night flight rating is required by the student, this would involve additional flying hours with some takeoffs, landings, and cross-country flying at dusk and a few hours flying by sole reference to your instruments.
- CAASL written exams: In addition to your flight training, you will receive many hours of ground school lectures by the academy to prepare you for the CAASL written exams. Time tables of lectures and flight training will be communicated to cadet pilots on a weekly basis.
Topics covered in the course :
- Aircraft systems: The basic components of an airplane, engine, flight controls, instruments, and how they operate.
- Aerodynamics: Basic principles of how an airplane is able to leave the ground, and how to control it once airborne.
- Meteorology: Basic concepts of weather formation and how to obtain and interpret weather information that may affect your flight.
- Radio Telephony: The know-how of communicating with various control centers such as communication towers, radar centers, right from start-up through to controlled air space, as well as emergency calls such as PAN calls, MAY-DAY calls, and the cancellation of such calls etc. Further, simulation of these procedures is also provided.
- Aircraft operations: Just as there are rules for operating automobiles on roads and highways, there are rules governing the operation of an aircraft in the National Airspace System (NAS).
