Originally Posted by
Airhoss
You might be right. They are sending all the initial and transition pilots through ORCA “training” currently. I put it in parentheses because I hear it’s a pretty weak training block.
I did the ORCA training on the 737 and to call it weak is an understatement. In all fairness, I was coming off of the 777 and was used to oceanic flying, so the instructor could have been just skimming through the program. Either way, it’s more of a familiarization than actual training. I’ve deliberately avoided the pacific qual as a captain because the trips usually involve a red eye leg (and I don’t want to deal with oceanic flying without CPDLC, WiFi, ACARS, and SATCOM), but it’s not uncommon to go down to the islands with a FO who has no clue how to do the cockpit preps, run a master flight plan, tune HF radios, or make position reports. If we’re going to operate in airspace with different procedures, there should be more training involved and currency requirements.