You will receive a study guide with flows, memory items, and limitations before arriving at class. It is totally on you, as it is with any other training I have been through, to be prepared on day 1. If you pay attention in class, use your personal down time to study, read, and immerse yourself in the course material (as any professional would), you will breeze through ground school.

The big disconnect I see from other training courses is that there is not a ground school for systems training. I really don't think that is such a terrible thing. Most pilots complain about "death by powerpoint" so as far as I am concerned, not sitting through another 8 days of powerpoint is a good thing. You will receive access to slide presentations on all of the systems, your syllabus publishes which systems will be covered in your Cockpit Systems Integration (CSI) sessions. If you watch the slides, come up with a set of questions, and bring them to your CSI, you will spend 1.5 hours of briefing with the instructor going over the systems related to that lesson. Then each student spends 2 hours in the pilot seat of a FTD going through flows and systems that were covered in the pre-brief, including failures and abnormal checklists.

After you complete the CSI portion of training you get a day or two to prepare for your Type Ride Oral. After successfully completing the oral you get 4 FTD lessons and 4 SIMS before you take your Type Ride. Thats 8 flight lessons. Granted, your first intro to V1 cuts is on FTD 3, and the FTD is quite limited in control manipulation, so the best you can do is simulate an engine failure after takeoff in the second segment climb, but you get the V1 profiles on day 1 of ground school. So you have plenty of time to study and chair fly long before you get to FTD 3. Once in the sim, you will see that a V1 cut in this airplane is the same as a V1 cut in any airplane. And if you were a turbo prop guy it is way easier!

In my opinion, Spirits training program isn't any harder than any other training program. It is however more condensed than some. It is more reliant on you, the professional, to prepare for the next days lesson because there is not much hand holding in this program compared to others.

Your instructors, for the most part, are well aware of the limitations of this training program and do a lot to compensate to give every student an equal opportunity to succeed. But, just like any other training program out there, if a student doesn't have the right attitude and put forth the effort, the instructors will only go so far. On the other hand, if a student shows up prepared, has a good attitude, and makes an effort to succeed, the instructors will go out of their way (within reason) to help you succeed.