1st day, the airport was socked in with fog and the old Seneca had poor instrumentation. He had pulled the circuit breaker on one of the instruments and labeled it "inop" because it was so bad the last guy had failed his ATP checkride because he was unable to read it. The guy that failed was an Air Force guy and we found out that the check pilot this program uses was an old Continental scab. Also found out it wasn't the first military person using this program the examiner had had hooked recently, either. Our jaws dropped. To compensate for the poor instruments in the plane, he had an ancient unlit black/white GPS suction cupped to the glare shield. We were to use this to fly our full procedure turns. ATIS called wx less than mins. The guy says, "Well, I can see 1/4 mile this way and 1/4 mile that way, that's a half mile, let's go fly." He refused to file any flight plans. Knowing that he keeps less than 1/4 tank of fuel in the plane because avgas is a few cents more expensive at this airport (he uses student flights to ferry fuel from "training bases" 60-70 miles away), we declined.
I have to respond to this. First, I spent $40,000 upgrading the avionics in 2007 so I have an EHSI, 2 ADIs, Garming 430 etc in the airplane. Visit our ATP page to see cockpit photos. Yes we used to use a VFR GPS for SA. And our ADF was inop and placarded. Second, I think there are a few mistatements in the preceeding, e.g. 1/2 mile vis and flying without flight plans can't be done from a towered field. When it is VFR, we do not file, if it is IFR, we do. Third. Yes I have had 2 or 3 busts in 11 years and over 200 ATP checkrides. The two military busts were guys who did not fly very much because of thier supervisory positions and although they busted, they felt the program was excellent and they just had a bad ride.
Fourth: I don't think you should judge an examiner by his background until you have been there. I know several of my graduates have been hired by Continental and enjoy flying for them. Fifth: I don't think we could do 2 1.5 to 2 hour training flights in a Seneca with less than 1/4 tanks. We might not top off every flight, but we keep it smart and legal. Sixth: At the time there was a big fuel mismatch and we did buy some gas at an airport 50 miles away, but we did some training at that airport so it did not detract from the profiles. We now buy all our gas at home station. Also, I have just run about a dozen guys from MEI thru the ATP prep and test in one day without any problems. They just did the written because they could get the ATP flight check from Flight Safety on their King Air/MC-12 sim check.
I regret when anyone has an unpleasant experience. We are constantly working to improve our training and if anyone has any questions, please call me at 662.574.9157