Starting out...

Well, we have been here exactly two weeks as of this morning and things are starting to get a little busier now. The first week here there really wasn't much to do. I think FM just wanted to give us some time to settle in. It was actually a very nice time to sit back and relax and get used to getting around the city a bit. However, this past Monday morning it was time for me to get down to business and start work on the license conversion process. Getting my licenses converted is essential to all of the rest of the paperwork that we have to get done. Without being licensed in Botswana, I can't get a residence permit, and without a residence permit I can't get a work permit. Additionally, without a residence permit we can't sign a lease, register a vehicle, open a bank account, or any one of a hundred other little things that we are going to need to do. The first step in the license conversion process is to take the Air Law exam. This is basiclly a test on the Botswanan FARs. That doesn't sound so bad until you see their FARs. It is one thing to read something that is written in legal-ease but when it is written in legal-ease in another country....it is that much harder to understand. Now, even that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the organization...or compelete lack of it...in their FAR book. It didn't even have an index so looking things up by keywords was out of the question. All in all this would have been a very difficult exam to study for adequately except that FM has had many pilots take this exam over the years and they had a very good idea of what was going to be on it. Given that they had developed a study guide that covered the exam well. I recieved the study guide on Monday and I took this exam this past Thursday. I would guess that I invested 8-10 hours of study time prior to taking the exam and I thought it went really well. Of course, I haven't recieved the results yet but I would be very very surprised if I didn't pass with room to spare. So, the next step involves taking a number of in-house exams. The nice thing about these exams is that are all open book and are intended more as teaching tools than tests. There is test on C90 (King Air) limits and systems, a short one on Botswana Air Law, one on the Botswana Aeronautical Information Publication (Basiclly, a very expanded airport facilities directory), and one on FMS's operation policies. Once the written exams are out of the way we will begin flight training. This will involve a number of training flights in the King Air and eventually a flight test with one of FMS's designated examiners. Supposedly, upon completion of the flight test I should be granted a Botswana license. Hopefully, we can start and maybe even finish the flight portion sometime next week. So far so good!