Originally Posted by flensr

My class had one guy fail his first try at the oral and one guy who didn't get the memo about trimming and turning the autopilot back on after the single engine go who had to redo the single engine stuff on his checkride. They both got a day or two additional instruction and a re-check which they passed without any apparent drama.

The one guy we thought would have trouble "quit" after IOE and went back to fly gray airplanes overseas. But that was mostly a personality mismatch as far as I know, not a skill or training problem really.

The impression I got was that for most pilots, an 80% effort burn plus even a TINY bit of effort at the hotel bar chatting with fellow trainees (for gouge and sanity checks) is more than enough to get anyone through. Yes, knowing your flows early and going through the applicable computer based training before each area is touched on in the classroom can help, but I think most people could show up totally cold and still make it through. Part of that is the pacing and quality of instruction, but part of it is also the fact that SWA has been very willing to just add on more training to give people another shot at whatever it was they didn't get right the first time, as long as the attitude and effort is reasonable.

For your specific questions:
1. No it's not hard for a professional pilot. I assume it would be hard for people with no experience, but the training center actually teaches.
2. It's a combination of self-study, actual teaching, and spoon feeding of things that won't make any sense until you actually go to the line and do the job. If you don't understand something, they'll attempt to teach/reteach.
3. It's called the guppy and everything you've heard about the 737 is true. What people sometimes don't realize until they fly it is that even when "yes it's true...", it doesn't really matter. It's not a hard plane to fly even though it's a switch forest nightmare and the MAX is a steampunk dream. Bottom line, it's busy and more fatiguing to fly than newer designs but mostly it doesn't really matter. You hop in, do the checklists and procedures, throw a bunch of switches, spend 5 minutes doing actual stick and rudder flying (if that much), then go home, just like any other plane. It is more tiring due to the relatively cramped and noisy cockpit, and I have a couple dents on the top of my skull from trying to punch switches back into the panel with my skull while getting into or out of my seat. I flew some really old planes in the USAF, the A320 series, and now the 737. Yes, it's an old plane. But it simply doesn't really matter. If you're in such bad shape that the difference in fatigue level between the A320 and 737 is going to make a real difference in your life, I suppose you might have some tough career decisions ahead that have nothing to do with the 737 vs. everything else.
4. The oral isn't hard, but yes you need to know not only what every switch does, but how that switch matters with respect to operational limits. As an example, you need to know that not only do the centerline fuel pumps pump fuel from the center tank to the respective side fuel manifolds, you need to know that you must have those pumps ON whenever there is more than 1000lbs of fuel in the tank and you're on the ground. You won't be required to disassemble or reassemble the fuel pumps, or draw a diagram. It might help to be able to do that stuff (draw a diagram of a system) but if that's not how your brain works then it's not necessary.
5. Not really. As I explained before the training center will retrain and recheck after a failure as long as there is any effort being put forward. As for IOE, we're hearing rumors of inexperienced new hires needing longer IOE or retraining, but I don't think we're firing people for skill/knowledge/experience issues yet. IOE fails that I personally know about were personality driven. If you crash the dang plane, yea you might fail IOE. I don't think we've really found the limits to training and check airman patience though, where it comes to firing new hires for just not being able to do the job.
6. Commuting anywhere sucks. We don't have redeyes so if you're commuting for reserves, you simply might be forced to fly in the day prior and leave the day after, depending on routing. Loads have been kind of a problem but most people are able to get where they're going as long as they have a second option if they can't get a seat on their first choice of commute flight. But our contract does not have protections for commuters that other airlines seem to have. For example, when commuting to reserve you're expected to be in place ready to get a call and ready to go to work the instant your reserve period starts, even on the first day. For an AM reserve commuting from west to east, that could mean having to be ready to get up around midnight local wherever you actually live to start your trip. And on the back end even AM reserves may get swapped to PM flying by the end of their reserve blocks so you could end your reserve assignment after our last flights leave that base so you could easily get stuck another night. My preference for commuting to reserve was to bid PM reserves so at least I could try to commute in the day my reserve block started, and just accept that I'd usually end up sleeping in the crew lounge from midnight to 5am before catching the first departure the next morning. Everyone has their own way to solve that problem, and not only does our contract suck for commuting reserves, the company has zero interest in changing anything and is fighting any changes that would make commuting easier.
7. I don't think I got a single technical question during the interview. That may have changed recently due to bringing in applicants with dramatically less experience than was the norm just a few years ago. The guy interviewing me looked like he was 100 yrs old so before the interview started I made a lame joke about his low seniority number and asked him what plane he learned to fly in. At some point the interview turned into an hour talking about classic aircraft and we never really got around to any technical questions. I think they wanted to see if we liked flying and from that determine a few things like if we were lying on our resume or if we had enough actual interest and background in flying that they could teach us whatever we didn't already know or have experience doing. As a military guy they already knew I wouldn't know hardly anything about 121 ops so mostly they wanted to see if I liked flying enough to be worth training. Just find a way to tell them your story in a way that makes it clear that you like flying and want to be here and you'll probably be fine.

The old stressful decision making scenario has apparently changed. The thing they were looking for before was if they gave you a problem with no good answer and then put you in a time crunch to come up with a solution, would you try to wing it by yourself or would you use a collaborative process to get input from all available resources and then make a decision. I don't know what they're doing for that nowadays, so use a good interview prep service to help give you an idea about what to expect in the interview. SWA doesn't like people who show up over-prepped and repeating what they got from the prep service, but if you use the prep to figure out how to tell your story without triggering any big negative responses from the interview team, I think it can help.