Originally Posted by spirittruth

My Experience with Spirit Training and my decision to leave,

Some things the pilot group may not know, that have been touched upon recently with no answers or nobody going far enough into them. The training department is no longer a training department! Recently the discussion went to why are all the failures occurring and what has changed and some nice things were said about the Flight instructors.

After talking to a line pilot flight instructor this is the story I received:
First it was Ground Instructors began teaching lessons more and more. Now the company has shifted to hiring advanced ground instructors from outside that are able to teach more of the lessons than the original Ground Instructors. Currently they are teaching CPT 1-5 and CSI 1-9. If you factor in two classes of 16 a month which would be 16 pairs of students X the 14 lessons they each need to get to CSI 9 that would be 224 lessons a month no longer being taught by our line pilots. That is 15 mostly senior line pilots a month no longer needed in the training department. If they can eliminate the training line pilots all together, which is the plan, they can send most of 75 training pilots back to the line that are senior to at least 50% of the company. This is a major factor seeing as how one of the pros to coming here was the potential for a short upgrade and one of the few things that make up for the horrendous pay.

How does this affect the pilot group? Well the easiest way to look at it is it puts all upgrades back almost a year. What is the difference in 1 year pay as a CA or 1 year as an FO? That is a question for each individual. The next thing is QOL that also affects the individual and is a personal question that each pilot would have to ask themselves. This affects the new hire pilots the most. They receive less than quality instruction from he Ground instructors and advanced ground instructors and this puts our career on the line. Ask some of the guys you fly with that are just out of training how they felt about the instructors they had! With stories of guys not know anything about a jet, having strange personalities, no knowledge of how Spirit operates, unable to answer simple questions, being condescending to guys with experience hired to be line pilots, being so old they cannot stay awake through the lesson, being so incoherent they can not even show up to work with two of the same color shoes on, and the list goes on….pool conversations and comparing stories are interesting to say the least. Do you know what happens when you fail training at Spirit regardless of your record? They just made it ten times harder for you to leave. Attrition problem maybe not solved but helped out.

As a new hire observing this, combined with the disgusting, poorly maintained training department that they are using (carpets and break room speak for themselves let alone no coffee machine), the training devices that barely work, listening to the instructor making excuses why it will not fly the approach correctly half of the time. How can I learn under this scenarios? What is pass or fail on a approach that can’t be flown? How did a guy in my class fail on a lesson for not being able to do an approach when it was supposed to be ground training? How can you blame a guy for failing an oral when the lessons that are supposed to be systems are nothing but flying approaches that don't work and the CBTs are ridiculously out of date? Add in the fact that you are like a hostage in a hotel for 6 weeks with no consistency in schedule. Something I realized later, maybe to much later was the contract. I didn't think it protected me but then I read this”

During initial, transition, upgrade, or requalification training, a change of training pilot may be requested by either the student or the training pilot. The Company shall not be required to honor a student’s request more than one time during the training assignment.

But who has the time during training to read the contract and most people will say it doesn't apply to them anyway, because they are in training. Newhire training is tough, I was one of the lucky ones and had a couple of good line pilots after CSIs to set me straight. I can only imagine if I would have had them earlier how much more I would know.

The last shoe to drop was the recent release of the much anticipated new pay rates! For the most part the guys I flew with were happy until then. We all had our training complaints but really thats what the company thinks a pilot is worth in this day and age? I turned down another offer to come to Spirit and only after that moment did I really understand the mistake I had made….

I have flown with a lot of great guys and it is amazing how the tone has changed since I have been here, now not only are the FOs leaving or trying to but the 5-8 year captains are applying to legacy airlines.