Originally Posted by
DreadWing
It would be a trivial matter to correct it.
In my former life, it was rather easy: the responsibility for dealing with ALL aircraft performance issues fell upon the captain. That isn't the case here with EWBS, TPS, and VAQ doing that work 99% of the time.
Checkride day always involved the crew doing a load manifest and calculating v-speeds with the QRH: ready to go in the sim briefing room. The new hires got plenty of practice actually planning flights beforehand in training, and for the recurrent crews--it was simply the paperwork that preceded any flight we made.
Of course...we had a FULL DAY of performance in class, complete with a review of Part 25 performance guarantees/constraints and the full catalogue of aircraft spaghetti charts.
Here, they could simply make every other IPT/CPT/sim flight a charter flight and add a FULL DAY for performance in class; that would SOLIDLY enforce an understanding.
YES! I remember those days very well. Systems ground school instructor had new hires do a complete manual W&B every day before they could leave for the day.
Then every sim lesson started with a manual W&B & performance calcs to use in the sim. By the time we hit the line, we could do it with our eyes closed. Came in handy too, since EWBS went down a lot back then, and ferry / mx flights were the norm on reserve. This, of course was on the CRJ. EMB performance isn't really even taught during training anymore. We had to figure that out on our own.
But I do hear there's an app coming out that does all the w&b and pref calcs!