Great week at Emirates Airlines Training College

It is Thursday afternoon and that means the end of the working week in Dubai (weekend is Friday-Saturday here). It has been a great week! Nicklas has been a great host, his kids are great and our activities at the Emirates training college have been highly successful. We have been running a 1,5 days crisis management training program with two groups of cadetes (Emirates employed pilot students) and today a one day demonstration session of our training program with instructors (pilots) of Crew Resource Management (the concept used in aviation (and other domains) world-wide to train pilots in communication, decision making, information management, leadership, teamwork, etc.).

The Emirates training college building is pretty cool (well, modest with Dubai standards) and built like an aircraft. We have been conducting the training in the conference room located in the cockpit of the building (see picture).

The Emirates Training College

The cockpit of the training college - a nice conference room

A group of cadetes engaged in the crisis management simulation program

Yesterday Nicklas showed me the cabin-crew training facilities at Emirates. They are crazy! They have built motion simulators of Boeing 777 and Airbus 330-340 (all really big airplanes!) for the cabin crew to practice all sorts of scenarios. All the passenger windows are computer screens so that you can look out and see engines on fire etc. We were lucky and met a really nice instructor who had nothing to do at the moment and he even gave us a ride in the Boeing 777 simulator ending with a failed nose wheel, crash on the runway and opening of emergency exits.

The Boeing 777 simulator that we took a ride in.

Inside the simulator

"Come this way, come this way!"

I won't go first!

The coolest mockup in the training centre is probably the Airbus 380 (the biggest passenger aircraft in the world). The mockup is put next to a pool to practice water-evacuation. However I would not volunteer for a slide-evacuation training session on the Airbus 380. The one from the second floor is a really steep slide!

Airbus 380 mockup for water evacuation training.

Dubai is still crazy. Yesterday (during the kids' evening Swedish class) Nicklas gave me a ride to the man-made island that from the sky looks like a palm. Then he took me to a mall with an indoor ski-resort. Yep - 400 m. of downhill skiing in a country that has 25C wintertime and 40C in the summertime... well, that makes perfect sense... otherwise the arabians could not practice skiing at all... sometimes the world is really progressing nicely.

The man-made palm island from the air. Photo not taken by me.

The hotel on the top of the palm

Nice sunset over the Persian Gulf (or Arabian Gulf as they say here).

Lots of construction work still ongoing.
Much of it took a halt during the crisis.

Ski Dubai from the outside. 

Crappy picture of ski Dubai from the inside

Slightly more informative picture.

Tomorrow I will probably make a trip to the old (well, relatively speaking) city centre of Dubai to have a look around there while Nicklas' kids are doing their homework. Then we will have the last supper of this stay at some nice restaurant choice of Nicklas. I'm looking forward to that already!

Life in Dubai continues...