RussR

Well, I just got back from my checkride this morning, with USMCFlyer serving as my SIC for the week, and I passed! The checkride is essentially just an observation of your performance during a normal itinerary. The examiner is an extra crewmember who, unlike most aviation checkrides, does NOT serve as the copilot, as this is not so much an evaluation of pilot performance (that's taken care of on other recurring checkrides), but an evaluation of the PIC's ability to keep the mission on track and deal with issues that arise. And, lucky me, we did have some issues. We dealt with aircraft mechanical issues, facilities needing adjustment, weather delays causing a work backup, and daily flight time limitations, all in a normal 4-day trip. Got to see a lot of the "beautiful" countryside SW of Corpus Christie, TX as we did a lot of work at the Navy bases at Kingston and Orange Grove.

Well, as an example for this week, each day there is a Daily Flight Log to be filled out after we're done for the day. This documents what kinds of inspections we performed and briefly what the results were (as in, Satisfactory or not) and is used by the schedulers to determine what tasks are now complete and which ones remain. This can be pretty simple or reasonably complicated depending on the type of work. I'm still new at doing it so it takes me a little longer than it will later on, but the longest one this week took about 20 minutes. Fortunately, my technician was entering a lot of the data into the log after each inspection as we flew to the next one. This helped a lot.

Today when we got back I had to make some phone calls about some issues that arose on today's inspections - for example, one airport's PAPIs were not working but there was no NOTAM. So I called the airport manager, he issued a NOTAM and I documented it on our Daily Flight Log. Not a big deal, but took some back-and-forth.

I also had some online training I had to complete today. I'd say I spent about 2 hours after we landed taking care of the immediate issues and the online training.

Next week I am not flying, so I will be working on reports. Most inspections we do require some kind of more detailed report than just the "Sat" we filled out on the Daily Flight Log. This can be a very detailed report that the technician is involved in generating, for example on a ILS it will list all the measured signal parameters, angles and so on. I will check it and add/change any information I need to and submit it. Then there are reports that the PIC fills out for more pilot-y things like PAPI inspections. Sometimes the reports are fairly involved, and some are pretty simple selecting drop-down boxes that say "Sat". Of course there are mandatory comments on some type of reports and an approved wording and format of the comments as well.

Since I'm still new to the reports, I suspect the majority of next week will be devoted towards these reports, making sure I fill them out right, get the right wording, and get the right data into them. I know people who have been doing this for a long time that typically finish their reports by Tuesday, and I hope to be there someday.

And then, towards the end of next week I will begin preparing for the following week's itinerary as well.

So it's more paperwork than a typical flying job. But it's certainly less paperwork than any non-flying desk job such as I had before. It's all a matter of perspective!