Originally Posted by
pilotscott
Stay away from this place.... the training is very intense and not in a good way but a very bad way. If and when you complete your training you come out drained and worn out. All the stress isn't worth it because when you come out, if you pass it your only flying old crappy twins that look like they have seen better days. if you have low times good luck but if you have high times go somewhere else.
Originally Posted by
PrettyFlyGuy
As I have been flying around doing charters I have discovered there are a ton of lifers in the night freight world who all seem to get paid less than Am flight so if they had a decent culture there are plenty of guys out there who they could poach that dig flying pieces of sh!t through the back side of thunderstorms all night. Or maybe the hiring department is only picking ding dongs who pencil whipped the 1200 hours and they have to be like that who knows. My father has 10000 hours between the metro and 1900 in the 80's so i hear all the time about his training which required all ndb approaches and he still had a more relaxed environment than here. Hell he had 3 engine failures, 1 fire and a stuck nose gear all in the metro. And flying a metro single engine is no cake walk. So he survived without being ridiculed through training. Now maybe your instructors never made it to the big leagues and have an ax to grind and fill there egos by t-bagging new hires in training so that could be it.
I've been lurking on this thread for a while now, but figured I'd nose in here at this point. Been with Ameriflight since late last year.
My personal experience with Ameriflight's [Metro] training department has been positive. Their instructors are very competent, passionate, and expect everyone to be able to succeed in the training. But there is a standard, and if you are unwilling or unable to study after class, identify your weak areas yourself, you won't hold up when it comes time for the checkride. In my class, we had one guy quit the day before his checkride and we had another guy require some extra training and eventually get reassigned off the metro.
Frankly, I see these moves as positive. They expect you to know your sh*t. If you don't, sooner or later it becomes obvious.
Are their planes old? Yup. Do they break sometimes? Yup. You will be expected to know them well enough to handle an engine fire, run the appropriate checklists, talk to approach control while bringing her around in low vis conditions to circle to land on a different runway (on the centerline). ALL while solo. You will do exactly this in training... and more.
I'll say Ameriflight isn't a good fit for everyone. Not everyone is cut out to fly solo at night 'up the back side of thunderstorms' as you put it. I'd rather they weed those guys out in training than on the line. Those that are able to make it through the training can enjoy a better than average salary (as you mention) and maybe someday a flow thru to UPS, who knows.
But do they ridicule you in training or demean you in any way? I've never heard of that happening, and frankly, quite the opposite. They want you to succeed. I've seen them bend over backwards to get a pilot more training. Just my experience.