Life is change

Quite a few major life events happened/happening this summer so I thought I blog about them and some of the experiences I had.

New job & new city/country

Yes, I found it hard to believe too that I'll ever be leaving Red Hat and the best manager I ever had (no offence to others but competing with Matthias is just impossible) but I'll be moving to Gothenburg to join Pelagicore folks as a Software Architect in just 2 weeks. I have always found Swedish language to be a very cute language so looking forward to my attempt of learning Swedish. If only I had learnt Swedish rather than Finnish when I was in Finland.

BTW, I'm selling all my furniture so if you're in London and need some furniture, get in touch!

Fresh helicopter pilot

So after two years of hard work and getting myself sinking in bank loans, I finally did it! Last week, I passed the skills test for Private Pilot License (Helicopters) and currently awaiting anxiously for my license to come through (it usually takes at least two weeks). Once I have that, I can rent Helicopters and take passengers with me. I'll be able to share the costs with passengers but I'm not allowed to make money out of it. The test was very tough and I came very close to failing at one particular point. The good news is that despite me being very tense and very windy conditions on test day, the biggest negative point from my examiner was that I was being over-cautious and hence very slow. So I think it wasn't so bad.



There are a few differences to a driving test. A minor one is is that in driving test, you are not expected to explain your steps but simply execute, where as in skills test for flying, you're expected to think everything out loud. But the most major difference is that in driving test, you are not expected to drive on your own until you pass the test, where as in flying test, you are required to have flown solo for at least 10 hours, which needs to include a solo cross country flight of at least a 100 nautical miles (185 KM) involving 3 major aeorodromes.  Mine involved Estree, Cranfield and Duxford. I've been GPS logging while flying so I can show you log of my qualifying solo cross country flight (click here to see details and notes):



I still got a long way towards Commercial License but at least now I can share the price with friends so building hours towards commercial license, won't be so expensive (I hope). I've found a nice company in Gothenburg that trains in and rents helicopters so I'm very much looking forward to flying over the costs in there. Wanna join? Let me know. :)

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