Air Wis as a first experience for Part 121 Tr
 

I highly regret choosing Air Wisconsin to be the first airline that I did Part 121 training with.

Now, I have a stain on my permanent record which I have worked hard to keep clean.

The problem with the training at Air Wisconsin is it is designed to be a pressure cooker. Management wants to be picky about which pilots they hire, but they don't want to pay a high industry salary, so they have decided the best way to reduce their simulator$$$ and IOE training$$$ fees is to try and send their pilot recruits blind into CPT so they have an inexpensive way to weed recruits out early on.

Air Wisconsin buys large blocks of leftover simulator time from competing regionals because it costs less. The problem with buying your simulator time this way is it can create big bottlenecks in your training flow. People get pushed too slow or too fast through training and it effects success rates.

This airline has a bottom of the barrel training department compared to other Part 121 regionals.

Air Wisconsin was the third regional that I applied at. To do it over again I would have applied at all the other regionals before resorting to Air Wisconsin.

Here are some quotes from another member on here that I thought would be helpful to ATP-CTP people:

"45%?? My class was 45% class before was 60% class after was just over 50, one after that was 40%. We have a very high failure rate. When I talk to friends that went to other regionals they have whole classes finish ioe before we get our trainees into the sim. "

"We have had over 150 new hires enter training this year, of those 150 under 100 are still on the seniority list with around 70 still in training. Do the math, of the 150 hired only 30 or so are done with training. It’s pathetic. Not all are failures, some moved into better things but most resigned during training at the request of the company"

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Note: I can't describe Air Wisconsin's training better than the way this guy described it here:

"Except for the fact they don’t teach profiles or flows, they give give you handouts and expect you to show to procedures trainer knowing them without prior instruction. The procedure trainer is nothing more than the student demonstrating they can do it all. """Air wisconsin is train by evaluation.""""

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


btw: I just wanted to say that Air Wisconsin's training is not impossible. If you are a quick learner and adjust easily to big jumps than you can probably pass this training without too many hiccups. Most people have trouble learning things this way.

So where did you struggle?

So you didn't go through different profiles during systems training? I'm through training and had every different experience than you did. So did the rest of my classmates. Our failure rate is on par with every other regional. No surprises here.

Come prepared and willing to be taught and you'll succeed. Buck the system and try to fly how you feel you should fly and you'll have problems. It is not much simpler than that.

I'm pretty new, perhaps too new to be jaded about regional flying yet, but I'd like to think I'm not one to blindly drink the kool-aid either. Having said that, I want to counter your experience with some of mine, so that those considering AW can have more perspectives of the training here.

Where did you get your information on how Air Wisconsin buys their sim time? It was my understanding that this airline, like nearly all CRJ operators, buy up ALL the CRJ sim time available, as they are so limited. It's so limited, that certain airlines literally buy sim time just to bottleneck competitor training (looking at you SkyWest). We were even briefly sending students to Europe just to get into more CRJ sims!

I don't have any other regional training events to compare it to (nor it seems do you), but I disagree that the training is meant to be a "pressure cooker" environment.

Is it fast paced? Yes, sometimes. But if you were an airline, wouldn't you want people in training to move through quickly so you're not paying for more non-revenue-generating labor than you have to?

While I do agree that there are probably more efficient, better ways to learn cockpit procedures than simply self study, I disagree that this is an intentional tactic used by AW to weed out people just to save money later on sims and IOE. Now, I would buy the argument that it can be used, and in some aspect is used as a way to weed out people who won't give the effort and self-discipline that self-study requires. But is that such a bad thing? Some of my friends at other airlines were simply given ipads with systems and operational information, and told to take weeks/months off and study it all at home - I'm glad that wasn't the case here!

It is an unfair statement to say that the training department here is the bottom of the barrel. Nearly every instructor I had, throughout the entire process, were knowledgeable, and sincerely wanted to help and have students succeed. When there were shortcomings, I personally witnessed on several occasions instructors addressing the material and working to improve it where they could.

I'm not sure what your end goal was in writing about your experience in training here, but I think others should know before they commit to AW, or any airline, that people can and do succeed all of the time. The cards aren't stacked against you, and you will get a fair shake.

I hope you get picked up somewhere else quickly and find a training system/rhythm that works well for you!

Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday you dig!

I have an incredibly hard time believing they’re “weeding people out” when you look at the amount of extra sim and OE time people are getting.

Every instructor I had here offered to help outside of class and was very active in ensuring success.

I don’t understand how people are complaining about “not knowing what is in CPT” when the whole syllabus is available to you day one and hammered by multiple instructors. No one is going into CPT “blind” unless you’ve stuck your head in the sand since day 1.

Is it a hard program? Sure. Are there things that need improvement? Always. Will you make it through if you’re motivated and put in the time? Most likely.
Best of luck to you.

This is probably my favorite comment here ever.

Because every other regional training is a relaxing and fun experience, right?
No need to self study, just sit and listen in class and you will be successful!
Wow.

Man, I hate to give you some more bad news, but that's 121 initial training for ya. Its fast pace and it requires some overtime study work to have your flows, call outs and procedures down before sim.

Instead of blaming the training department for falling short in training, own your failure, figure out what you could have done better to be more successful, and put that experience into your toolbox for your next training event.

Its not impossible to make it to the majors with a 121 failure in your background, but it will become impossible if fail to own your failure.

I'd pay good money for a video of him interviewing elsewhere, and saying he failed because the training was too fast paced.

I would make sure that you read this thread before you decide to apply for a First Officer or Airman Trainee position at Air Wisconsin:

https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/a...od-choice.html

Here are some more quotes from other pilots:

"Think carefully about that decision. Air Wisconsin is back to doing the stuff they did to people a few years back not that they ever stopped I would say don’t take the bonus and find another employer to go with unless you like low training pay and being washed out of training for no apparent reason there is a lot of shady crap that goes on with that company and they try and scare people not to post on here if you do they will come after you for libel and slander. Oh well.

The people and crews are great to work with but I wouldn’t trust management PERIOD."

"Let’s be nice to each other now, in all fairness giving someone a piece of paper with completion standards and sending them home to figure it out is a recipe for disaster. There is zero effective study material for someone not already familiar with the plane. No videos, they break up classes so classmates from one class to go cpt with someone from another class. Makes it very hard to study when every 3-4 days for 2-3 months they call and give you a new partner only to phone study with them for a day or 2 before switching to someone else. The whole learning process is like learning from a fire hose but the flow of knowledge is off at the hydrant. No Information is given in how to do things right until you get to cpt then it’s an overload. If your not someone who can read the Fcm, and visualize what it’s saying to do for the flows and checklist it’s very hard to learn. Most people are visual learners and with zero demos or videos it makes it hard for them to process everything through self study alone. There is a reason 2/3 of people fail at first attempt through ctp"

"Can you tell me what the completion standards are? There is absolutely no syllabus or course outline for training. You're at the whim of the instructor. God forbid, you have to switch instructors in the middle of your course. Zero guidance would be more than this place provides. "

"This must be someone in charge of training. It summarizes the attitude of management and some instructors. “It’s all bad students, has nothing to do with the system” hate to break it to you, but with just about everyone needing additional training at either the sim level or cpt level it might be the instructors or training program. The fact that out of the 15 or so recent hires that I talked to I can only think of 1 who made it through first try on everything and even he went to Germany for 5 extra “free” sims to get a feel for the plane. You would think that with all the extra time and money spent on training all these bad hires the company would look at the training program and make some changes. If other companies can train to the same ATP standards with a much higher pass rate in shorter times something is wrong with the program and not the students."

It’s not hard if you can memorize the flows and Callouts and have a lot of imagination. (Things happen faster in cpt with zero visual cue compared to the sim) (it takes 45 seconds to a minute or so for the real thing to go from “set thrust” to 1000’ but in cpt it happens in 15 seconds. when I went through I met a captain upgrade going through with a new hire at the bar and he was saying that it’s much harder now and there is a lot more to it than when he went through as a new hire. He said it’s a lot more organized with more completion standards."

It seems like you are looking to blame everyone but yourself here. I’d highly suggest changing your outlook before applying anywhere else let alone going into an interview with the attitude that ‘you got screwed.’ Welcome to the 121 world. It’s fast paced. You are being paid to be there. AW isn’t the only shop that expects their pilots to show up knowing their flows and limitations. Far from it. This isn’t a private pilot course or the happy hands club where you get spoon fed all of the information at a leisurely speed. In this hiring environment the only reason someone is getting canned is due to attitude or a serious performance deficiency.