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Old 05-10-2015, 08:43 AM
  #29  
MaydayMark
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Joined APC: Apr 2006
Position: MD-11 Captain
Posts: 4,304
Default Flight Training "Management"?

Off-site training must cost a fortune! Sim rental time, contract instructors, travel, hotels, rental cars and per-diem

Back in WW2, when I went through MD-11 f/o training we were doing offsite Ground School at McDonald Douglas in Long Beach and sims in either Helsinki (FinnAir) or Zurich (SwissAir). We even did McDonald Douglas CMI which was a good thing because the FedEx CMI was subsequently decertified by the FAA!

While trying to plan my travel from Long Beach to Helsinki (with a few days at home in between) I became frustrated when "Memphis" couldn't confirm my schedule for the last week in Long Beach!

I called the MD-11 Training Manager and said, "Bruce (not his real name), let me tell you how they do training at other airlines. At other airlines your entire training schedule arrives in the mail 30 days before training begins. Unless you become a training problem that is your schedule! How come you can't tell me what I'm doing tomorrow!*?"

The industry knows that training can be accomplished MUCH more efficiently than we do it. I guess we'll just have to make it a contract agenda item if we ever want to fix? That's disappointing ...

As a side story; going through systems training and ground school with McD instructors was interesting. We had numerous systems discussions, "I'm going to teach you how FedEx says you're going to operate the system; then we'll discuss how the system was designed to be used." If we had a systems question that the instructor couldn't answer ... at the break, he'd go speak to the McD engineers and come back with Company schematic diagrams. That was REALLY GOOD training!


Last edited by MaydayMark; 05-10-2015 at 09:04 AM.
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