NO 12 SQUADRON

My glorious years with No 12 Squadron, RMAF Butterworth.



Top Gun Squadron 1987


Left to right, Coolie, Gary, Batu, Taipan and Ashburn

TAMING SARI

The very first LIMA , in Dec 1991 . I was the soloist, No9. We lost one of our buddy during training near Alor Setar Airport.

My First Flight To Chicago

The flight from Abu Dhabi to Chicago, Ohare International Airport took 14 hours and 40
minutes, flying over Iran airspace, Turki, Europe, over the North Atlantic and Canada. We took off at 1010 am Abu Dhabi local time and landed at 1540 local time Chicago, same day. This is becouse Chicago is -6 hours of UTC or GMT and Abu Dhabi is +4 of UTC. So at the time we landed, at our point of departure already 0140 am the next day. We landed using runway 14R of that busiest airport in the world.

Chicago, viewed from my hotel room, which is just beside The John Hancock Tower.

The temperature was around 3/4 deg celcius, I was just wandering around the hotel, afraid of catching cold.

John Hancock Tower. I was there on Saturday, a lot of tourist lining up to buy tickets to get up to the top.

Of all the places in the world, I had Tilapia Fish n Chip for lunch in Chicago. No choice, that was the only halal food I could find in that restaurant.
( masak lomak cili api sodap jugak)

On the way back, broke my record,the fastest ever in commercial planes. Doing 627 knots of groundspeed or 1160 km/hour. That was due to the jetstream we were riding on, wind speed of 148 kts directly on our tail, somewhere over Canada, near Toronto.

CASABLANCA

Nama terlebih indah dari rupa. Mula mula dengar nama Casablanca, sebuah bandar di Morocco cukup exotic. Sampai ada filem bertajuk CASABLANCA. Saya tak pernah tengok lagi pun cerita tu. Morocco, sebuah negara yang paling utara di Benua Afrika, pernah dijajah oleh Spain, France dan British, sebab itulah penduduknya boleh bertutur berbagai bahasa, bahasa utama adalah Arab dan kedua French.



Mula mula sampai, nak masuk sikit punya susah sebab kena stamp passport walau pun kita orang menggunakan crew lane, still kena beratur celah celah penumpang yang lain yang tak peduli menggunakan crew lane sesuka hati dia orang. Jadi sebagai Captain, terpaksalah saya pergi berjumpa pegawai immigration dia orang minta priority, tu gunanya pakai kot dengan empat bar yang berkilat di lengan... Pada keseluruhannya, bandar ini tiada yang menarik , cuma sedikit bersih dari Mumbai atau Delhi. Berbeza dengan Maraketh, satu lagi bandar yang terkenal di Morocco yang sememangnya cantik dan menarik.



Casablanca dari udara







Waktu pagi di Bandar Casablanca, masih lagi sunyi, tak banyak kenderaan, mungkin sudah ramai yang bercuti kerana pada masa ini adalah sehari sebelum Aidul Adha.

Lagi pemandangan di Casablanca, berhampiran dengan Central market.

Ini adalah pemandangan di dalam kawasan Central Market. Ada banyak lorong lorong dan kedai kedai yang menjual berbagai bagai seperti pakaian, barang barang kulit, electronic, perhiasan dan macam macam lagi. Yang meluatnya ada ramai peminta sedekah yang melekat macam lintah selagi tak dapat habuannya.


































Sempat masuk kedalam kedai ini untuk membeli set tagine, konon kononnya nak masak sendiri nanti kat rumah. Satu set harganya kira kira RM20.






























Makanan tradisional Morocco, Tagine. Yang ini saya order room service di pagi raya Aidil Adha. Sedap juga tagine ayam ni, walaupun tak sesedap rondang ayam kampung yang pedas.

Flight to KHARTOUM

The route to Khartoum from Abu Dhabi is mainly overflying various cities in the Middle East such as Doha, Riyad, Jeddah and Port Sudan after crossing the Red Sea. The flight time slightly over 4 hours.

A closer look at the route over the Google Earth. Flying over Jeddah and quite close to Makkah.

Managed to snap a picture of Makkah city, the brightess spot is the Masjidil Haram where the Kaaba is situated right at the centre.

Touched down at Khartoum during the sunrise, refuelling was done by our non other than PETRONAS, the Malaysian Nasional Petroleum. A proud moment to share. After a morning stretching and a cup of coffee, ready to fly back to Abu Dhabi, shorther flight time by almost an hour due to the strong tailwind.

My New Toy, The iPhone 3GS

I bought this iphone a few weeks back. It is unlocked set and I jailbroke it my self so that I can use third party applications, not only from the itune store. A lot of application can be downloaded for free and some with a small amount of money. What I am writing here is about the aviation applications that can be used by the iPhone. If the left photo is enlarged, can be seen there a few applications for aviator such as FlightPlan, PilotLog,Pilot ToolBox, Aeroweather and Winter320. iQuran and Qibla Direction application also available. The right picture can be assess by touching the FlightPlann icon and from there a lot of aviation stuff can be done especially the calculation.

Click on the photo to enlarge.

This is the AeroWeather which I downloaded before the flight simply by connecting to wifi and dictate the required airports. It is in standard aviation meteorology code but if unsure of the code, just touch the encode button.

click on the photo to enlarge.

I tried out the Navigation part by putting in the wind speed,direction, the course or the line on the earth surface that you suppose to fly and the true airspeed. The result, heading to fly is 130 deg, as shown by the yellow line on the Navigational Display on the right picture and the ground speed is569 kts, shown GS 568 kts on the ND top lefthand corner. Close enough? Make sense isn't it becouse the wind is from the right and behind of the plane, so pushing it forward to have a faster ground speed and the plane has to fly heading to the right to compensate for the wind..correction by 3 deg.. cool. So without the plane's computer, I can calculate my own now.

And, another use of the iPhone, favourite youtube can be downloaded and saved for viewing at 39000 feet. Michael Bubley Save The Last Dance For Me is really sweet ,come with Nescafe Tongkat Ali Ginseng.

Flying To Melbourne

This was my second flight of the month after a long one month vacation. Was enjoying my Ramadan and Syawal with family in my home sweet home country. It is F1 fever in Abu Dhabi and I got the chance of flying this A340-600 F1 livery to Melbourne recently. Almost straight route following the great circle as shown on the google Earth map above.

In flight, I occasionally have a look at the camera screen, enjoying the beauty of cloud over Australia. The lower ECAM screen will show the images from the upper camera situated at the tail pointing downward and also the nose camera pointing forward located under the belly forward belly.

After landing, the Captain's PFD when selected to taxi camera, will show the image of the plane and the nosewheel in relation to the ground. That is called TACS or Taxi Aid Camera System which really help the Captain to maneouver while on ground taxiing toward the parking bay or to the runway for take off. So far, this 340-600 is still the longest plane in the world.

From this picture, we can see the nosewheel is exactly on the line and the plane is centred on the taxiway. See how accurate my handling is, hehe.

Reaching the parking stand. Phew, it was 13 hours flight !!

We took off at 11 pm at night and landed at sunset the next day.

The whole day gone in the air.

Ramadhan Kareem !!!

Tak sabar nak tunggu roster bulan depan, nak check hari Jumaat terbang ke tidak. Kalau tak nak juga pegi ke Bazaar Ramadhan, Abu Dhabi ni. Nak beli ayam percik, hehe.
Selamat berpuasa.

ROUTE

This was the air route planned for my flight from Abu Dhabi to Dublin last week. The route prepared by the Jeppesen is normally the shortest flight time and the minimum fuel requirement to reach the destination after reviewing the weather forecast for the most advantages wind component. The solid thick black line is the Great Circle line, the shortest distance between two points on the surface of the Earth and the red line is the route that we flew, following the Airways. My airline is a customer of Jeppesen who plot the route and prepare the flight plan on each flight.

Here are the pictures of the routes back ,DUB to AUH which I saved in googles earth format. Easier to refer now, less opening up of airways charts. The thumbtack points are the waypoints on the airways chart, BIG is a waypoint overhead London City.

MONT BLANC

Jenama untuk pen, barangan kulit, perhiasan, jam dan minyak wangi ini berasal dari nama gunung yang tertinggi di banjaran Alps, iaitu 4810 m atau 15,781 kaki dari aras laut. Ia terletak betul betul di sempadan antara dua negara Italy dan France. Bandaraya yang paling hampir adalah Geneva ,Switzerland dan saya sempat menganbil gambar gambar gunung tersebut semasa hendak mendarat di lapanganterbang Geneva.

BRUSSELS

TCAS, Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System. Each plane once issued with the enroute clearance will be given a 4 digits code for the transponder, termed as squawk code. In this case, the code that we got for our flight to BRU was 3721, key in to the TCAS panel as shown on the left picture above by my copilot before we begin our flight. When the transponder selected to ON, it will continously giving information to the Air Traffic Controllers and other aircrafts transponders . The ATC will see the information for the particular plane base on the squawk code such as the planes callsign, position, altitude, heading and speed. For other aircrafts, please refer to the picture of the Navigational Display on the right. Click on the picture for bigger image. The white diamonds indicate the position of other aircrafts flying nearby with the altitude differences. In this case, the aircrafts heading is 315 deg and there are 4 other aircrafts flying nearby. The nearest is 2000 feet above, +20, one at 40 nm away, 6000 ft below , 2 aircrafts at 50 nm away at 5000 ft below and 2000 ft above. We were flying at 38000 ft over Turkey, LTAC in the ND is Ankara airport.

Beautiful countryside of Belgium as we descending toward Brussels airport. Finally ,after 6 hours and 40 minutes in the air, we were cleared to land on runway 25L BRU.

Brussels in the morning, view from my room.

Actually very seldom to have a sunny day in Brussel. Most of the time cloudy or raining.

Well, time for me to catch up with the lost sleeping time.

Ada berani ?