Originally Posted by
scorpius
Of course there will always be people who are negative about everything, but that's just everywhere and especially in the airline industry. It all boils down to upbringing and your life experiences. As someone earlier in the thread mentioned, if you've worked your share of crappy jobs in the past.. you likely learned something from all of them. You can't go to school for that.
Yessir. We have quite the variety of pilots, from the young and barely 20's to the 40s/50s looking for good QOL. There are whiners and cool ones in all the age groups.
Originally Posted by
scorpius
Anyway I will get to the point. I don't have the TT to be competitive for a flying job there with you yet but I wanted to reach out to you guys to see what advice you might have to make me a good candidate for SIC, that could help me get hired sometime early or mid-next year 2017. Any suggestions are welcome.
Instructor experience and applying around 600 hours seems to be the ideal thing to do right now.
Originally Posted by
scorpius
Some questions if I may --
- What bases are in most need of pilots at present?
- What values do you and your company look for in a fellow pilot? (company culture)
- Any "gotcha" type questions during the phone interview?
- What did you use to study for before day 1 of training?
- What books did you hit up regularly before even applying?
- Did anyone have a PC12 flightsim profile set-up to prepare?
- Which legs/approaches/wx/ops would you find the most challenging in your everyday flying?
- They all need pilots every few months, as the job is still a stepping stone for most. DEN has seen a lot of growth lately. PDX just opened and an entire new hire class was dedicated to it, so they may need more or they may be good for a bit.
- Even though trips are short, we still want you to be a tolerable person to be around. We're in front of the pax all day, so our appearance and conduct is important. Aside from that, being knowledgeable on the airplane and the operation once you get through training and not being lazy on the minimal things your job entails are looked upon highly by other pilots and the CSAs.
- Not really, they're all very straightforward. I avoid giving out gouges because it's all truly basic knowledge and if you can't make it through the interview on your own, you probably shouldn't be here (not meant in a rude/condescending way, it's just that training assumes you're good on basics and doesn't have time to babysit you).
- Not a lot - you'll be given computer based training to start on, it's a huge pain in the ass. 40-50 hours of material, a lot of it not applicable to a small 135 operation like ours but it all has to be completed anyway.
- I tried to look at a PC-12 POH but didn't get very far. I also brushed up on IR basics via study guides and everything from my IR checkride. I did some basic 135 studying with things like "Everything Explained for the Professional Pilot" but it wasn't necessary for the interview - since I didn't have 135 experience, they didn't expect me to know anything about it.
- No - there's a basic XPlane sim set up in the crew house at training but the controls are jacked up and it's not very useful for what you'll be doing in training anyway.
- Where I'm at we have two different trips, and they're both pretty straightforward. WX at night can be fun (thunderstorms/strong echos), but we have weather radar and center is usually helpful. Getting in and out of the Bravo is probably the busiest part of the flying, and that isn't even too bad if you're on top of radios.