Originally Posted by gr8vu

Here's my experience--maybe it will help someone out there.

I started my prep by 9 months ago with a goal of getting out 14 months later (retiring summer 2014). I purchased Lengel's book and called a buddy at UPT to get the latest student gouge. Without a purpose this book is hard to read because it has so much info but later on it was invaluable for reviewing key areas. On trips I pulled up the AF regs, manuals, handbooks on wx, instruments, etc for review. I then paid for ECIC and listened to the audio twice over several months. 3 months later, Albie was nice enough to schedule one in my area and I attended a session (It helped that I sent several emails and texts over about 6 weeks begging for a class). The session was more than half full of pilots with DAL, UAL, SWA, and JB interviews (many had more than one) in the coming weeks. It was good experience watching them in the hot seat and I was glad to not be caught in a rush to get ready. As luck would have it, I got an email invite less than month later for a Jan interview. Three weeks after that I got another invite also in Jan. To prep for both I then ordered the aero for naval aviators and mental math for pilots and reviewed over the holidays. I really like the naval book (it's in between my old aero eng book that is too technical and the watered down normal flying books) but my wife does laugh at me as I stare at the CL charts and study the L/D max stuff. I didn't read it from cover to cover just the parts appropriate for the interviews I was prepping for. I also met several at the prep course who gave me great feedback on their interviews. If I had printed out all the gouge it would have been over 500 pages and they helped me narrow it down to about 100 pages of key stuff. I have to also stress the networking side. I used linked-in/facebook and seniority lists. Thru those resources I found a small list of old squadron mates at each airline that I reached out to. I also hit the guard and reserve squadrons at my base and did some more networking. I now have a list of contacts at just about every airline and cargo company. I applied to every open app window and pushed for internal recs. I learned that recs take about 2 months to generate if you just send someone your resume and then follow up politely. I stopped trying to use their airline email because many have no idea how to get into their accounts. I now offer to write the draft and send it along with my resume--this cuts the time to usually less than a week. These recs were key to my two invites. In both scenarios, I got calls from these folks about a month prior to being invited and they wanted my latest resume and reminded me to double check my application for any errors. Before the interview I reviewed portions of ECIC tapes and scheduled a phone session to practice my intro and get the latest updates.

The interviews were stressful but I went in confident that I was prepared to handle most any scenario. I am still waiting on background checks so nothing is official yet--crossing my fingers.

Good luck but do your homework.

As a side note, all of us who were married shared common stories of upset spouses for the past few months--comments like we were so detached from the family, etc. Someone ought to start a support group for all of us or them--haha.