Originally Posted by CLT Guy

PSA is growing quickly and there are certainly some growing pains. Some of the instructors are very good, but some are not. The good news is that most of the bad ones are weeded out very quickly. I know that if you go to the training department and ask for a new instructor, you will get one assigned to you very quickly. The worst part is when an instructor trys to teach you his "technique" and pass it off as the only way to do it. Other guys have spent more than a decade at another regional teaching the CRJ, and get callouts or procedures confused between PSA and their old company. This can be very frustrating!

In sims, to help combat this, you are assigned a different instructor for sessions 1-4 and 5-8. That way, you can see different people. If you are not happy with an instructor, speak up. They will but another instructor in the sim with you at the very least to see what is going on. Most likely, you will get another one immediately.

There is also a great deal of "this is the way that we do it". PSA only had 400 pilots a year or so ago, and there was a small airline mentality. They didn't worry about getting some things in writing, and they are paying for it now. They are having to quickly re-write some training materials. Some things (like stalls for instance) are not well documented in the materials.

The wait time between training portions also seems to be getting to be increasing. It used to be that you could be done and out in 3 months. Now it is more than 4 months from what I heard. You are paid during this, but there is no excuse for it to take that long. The nice part is that you can get whatever base you want right now before you start IOE, and will likely be a line holder anywhere but CLT within a month of finishing IOE.

Oh, and being on reserve can really suck. That should get better with more people, but it is not fun right now. Reserve trips are a mixed bag of crap. Good thing it only lasts a couple of months.