Flight Radio Telephone Operator syllabus material
This post will primarily be a progress log for myself, so no pretty pictures or exciting adventures around Milford Sound this time – consider yourself warned if you choose to continue reading!
Since I found a FRTO book in the library, rightly or wrongly I’ve started the semi-serious study of this topic first.
The edition of the book I have is from 2003 so I suspect that getting an up-to-date copy will be beneficial but the fundamentals should be relatively similar.
The PPL Syllabus Advisory Circular (AC61-3) I printed out states the following syllabus items for flight radio telephony - these are also reflected in the NZQA exam outline found online (NZQA is the entity conducting the exams):
Basic Radio Wave Propagation
Transceivers
SSR Transponders
Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT, aka ELBA or ELB)
Practices and Rules
Phraseology and Procedures
Distress and Urgency Communications
Loss of Communications – Aircraft Equipment
Loss of Communications – ATS Equipment Failure
I have little experience of radios (we used various field radios in the army including the ‘long wire’ long range reconnaissance radios – but they never taught us much theory, just how to use them in practice in our limited scope of operations) so most of this stuff is new to me.
Some of the study material assumes a level of understanding regarding general flight operations (airspace classes etc.) which makes me wonder if the Air Navigation and Flight Planning topic should be studied first…but mostly it is quite easy to look up what’s what to fill in the gaps.
So far I’ve studied through the introductory chapter of the book, which covers the general fundamentals of radio technology, the characteristics of HF and VHF frequency bands and introduces the typical radio equipment found in GA aircraft (VHF-COM, NAV-COM, SSR Transponder).
I think this radio stuff will really require the practical experience so I’ll definitely look into VATSim / PilotEdge for some practice once I’m through this topic. At this point I’m a little bit apprehensive - I’ve listened to a bit of VASAviation on Youtube and the listening comprehension is hard; the transmissions seem garbled and everyone speaks fast. It seems I’m two steps behind, rotating a compass wheel in my head trying to follow what’s going on and understanding every third transmission if that.
Then again I guess the language comprehension gets easier when you have a thorough understanding of the context/phraseology and what messages to expect etc.
Anyway – it’ll be interesting to see how long it’ll take me to wade through this one topic. Probably gives me some insight into how long I can expect to take to go through the whole syllabus.