Wednesday 3 April 2013

Managing my space.

Mentally I’m a very organised person. I have a very logical mindset. It took me a while in my working life to realise that many people don’t work the same way that I do, that they don’t see the immediate logical path that I do.

Notice that I said “mentally”, when it comes to physical organisation not so good to be perfectly honest. My desk at work looks like a paper factory spewed up over it, much to the disgust of those who work with me, I can still instantly find anything on it. I think I use a chronological filing system. The older the piece of paper, the further down the heap it’ll be.

Consequently organising myself in the cockpit has been a challenge. There’s a reasonable amount of stuff that you need ready access to and, quite frankly, not a lot of space to play with.  It has taken me a long time to come up with a method that even comes close to working. I’ve had numerous false starts, there was the infamous “clipboard on the instrument panel” incident for example. I’ve tried with a knee board (on either leg), without a kneeboard. I’ve tried utilising the pockets in the plane (tricky because some of the planes don’t have front pockets). I’ve tried the “here hold this” method but I’ve discovered that instructors often wish to play a more active role in the flight than merely being mobile storage devices!
It hasn’t help that because of my short stature and general use of cushions, I need to be careful that my kneeboard doesn’t interfere with the full movement of the control column. I think though that last lesson I may have found a combination that appears to work. I managed to attach my chart to the yoke clip and wear my kneeboard in such a way that I could access the clipboard bit to write on and use the chart pocket as a kind of “drop stuff in here and grab it when needed” section. I wasn’t floundering too much for items. As I mentioned before I managed to grab a pencil and ruler and use it to draw a straight line on my chart. Something I have never achieved before.

Sometimes it’s the small things that make me happy!

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