You recently became part of the promotion team of the flag carrier of the country, and you're tasked to shoot a new travel commercial. On the first night, you find yourself in a different world set 80 years from the past---a time where the world was...
The point at which an aircraft first makes contact with the landing surface.
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"Does your entire life flash right in front of your eyes before you die? I wonder."
A/N: Despite the fact that I've enjoyed writing this chapter (because I loved the angst!), it was quite heavy for me to write it. Adding to the recipe the fact that when I began working on this, I coincidentally also received the first batch of materials necessary for our Airbus A320 flight training; which was the Computer-Based Training (CBT). A rough preview of the CBT was just imagine being handed a manual of a car, and you'll need to understand every small aspect of it to the very last screw; hell, now imagine it as the case for an airplane. So, yeah. In the CBT, it tackled everything that we should know like some sort of an engineer or mechanic or flight attendant or communications officer or strategist or analyst or programmer (with all the codes necessary) or even that of a lawyer or doctor (due to the laws and the oxygen and emergency things). How every system works and how the operations would be from normal to the abnormal to the worst possible scenarios (like we were expected to act as some sort of a computer, too!). Haven't I mentioned that even the autoflight system itself was the longest of the discussed systems just because its operation was detailed on? And for anyone who thought that we were just chilling on the cockpit because of the autopilot; well, we aren't, with how complex it was to operate and understand the system itself alone! So, after 178 hours, 1,418 pages and 48 subjects of CBT notes, I finished it on time before ground school itself. Anyhow, with the upload of this chapter, today is currently my second to the last day with the A320 ground school. (Hell, whatever we've self-studied in the CBT wasn't even discussed on ground school, because the subjects discussed were the next level of the self-study.) To be exact, at the upload of this chapter, we're two hours and twenty minutes already in our supposed-to-be last lesson, which is UPRT (Upset Prevention and Recovery Training); because our Performance Computation instructor didn't attend yesterday because it was Pampanga Day and we don't actually have any holiday. For the past few days, we've been under the good teaching environment of former airline pilots, wherein one of them had been Capt. Dexter Comendador himself. (To give you a preview of me fangirling in a sense about him; well, he's the former COO and President of AirAsia Philippines, and the Second Officer of the PAL Flight 434 (1994) which experienced a bomb explosion on board but with Capt. Reyes and FO Herrera, they managed to land the crippled plane safely with only one casualty (the one seated on where the bomb exploded). The said flight was the test run of the unsuccessful Bojinka terrorist attack, which would then be the blueprint for the September 11 (9/11) attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon six years later (2001). According to him, at that time of the accident, time just moves very slowly. Here's him discussing the normal procedure and briefings of the Airbus A320, and he might be our instructor for tomorrow's Performance Calculation because of schedule mismanagement, and hopefully, a picture with an idol 👀:
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