Saturday, October 19, 2013

Achieving 20,000 hours of Flight Time


20,000 hours in the air.....now that is a long time!. I did my 20,000 hours flight on 12 Sept 2013. It was a co incidence that the flight was to perform a line proficiency check on the Chief Pilot Standards of the company. The route was from Kerteh to Tapis Delta platform and back and it was on a EC225 helicopter registration 9M SPI.


Looking back at my flying log books, I started my first flight as a student pilot at the RMAF Heli Flying Training School on 21 Feb 1977 at the age of 19 years (birthday on 22 Feb!). The flight was conducted on a Bell 47 G 5A helicopter (Airframe FM 2003). That makes it 37 years of flying !


After basic training I went to Advanced Training on the Alouette 3 turbine helicopters.


And then it was on to the Nuri helicopters until the end of my military flying career.


Just prior to becoming an offshore pilot, I was doing freelancing for Guthrie Estates and at the same time I was a bush pilot flying the Bell 206 for heliservices in Malaysia.


 I did a stint as an instructor on light aircraft in the Royal Selangor Flying club. Here I flew the Cessna 152, Cessna 172, Cessna 206, Piper Lance, piper Cherokee and Piper Dakota. I had great fun and made some extra money doing charters as well. It was also here that I got my Commercial pilots Licence for fixed wing machines (aeroplanes)


 In 1983 I started instructing on Ultralights for Para Aviation as is amongst the first Malaysian to fly microlights. My licence number is 004!. The following year, with friends Mejor Johnny Loo and Wong Kim Hoong we formed and operated a Ultralight Flying School. Of course we lost quite a fair bit of money here but it was here that I purchased an aircraft and it bears the registration of 9M WYF which is my initials. the last i heard about my aircraft is it is in Keningau.

I hope to achieve at least another 5000 hours before retiring from flying.