Orville,

The title of your post is fairly ironic because, like Faux News, it contains virtually nothing factual.

Between ground school and sims there is a fixed base simulator program that is quite extensive. If you haven't learned your flows by the time you reach the full flight simulator YOU are wasting the IP's time and the Company's money.

Anyone willing to invest the personal time and sweat equity to learn the EPs/flows/profiles will not have any problem with the Omni training program. However if you're expecting to sneak through without putting in the effort you're out of luck.

You'd better thank God you didn't come up in the era where they expected you to draw the entire electrical, fuel, hydraulic and pressurization systems from memory during a six (6!) hour systems oral. Your head would have exploded.

 

Pilots like Orville will have trouble no matter what airline they go to. Instead of spending time complaining on an Internet forum open your books and read. If you're not dedicated enough to put in the work to pass training and continuously educate yourself please find a different profession.

 

The biggest hurdle for the new hire is letting go of their past training experience. The Omni training format is in parallel with how Boeing teaches. The aircraft manuals are set up the same way. You have to look for things in several different manuals and it doesn't make sense. There are many company manuals because of the environment the airline operates that also need to added into the mix. Those that study and learn their way around the manuals find that all the questions and confusion get sorted out in the FDT portion of training. Those that have poor study habits or need to be spoon feed everything will have a hard time with the training. It's not a regional airline. It's a widebody, on demand, international operation. Low experience or lazy will probably not get through the training program.

 

I had an interview scheduled this week but had to cancel it due to being on a contract trip and it got extended. I originally told the HR person at Omni, that would probably happen with this group I was flying. Anyway, they said they didn't have any future interview dates available right now and would get back to me.

I'm curious what I may have lost out on here. Is the pay scale shown on this site, accurate? First few years in the 50k range? Upgrade over 6 years or so? Thanks for any imput you can provide, just wanting to see if this was a job I would have stayed at or okay to pass by.

For the past 10 years I've been making over a 100k and was ready to take a cut to go somewhere long term, but I wouldn't be able to take a huge cut for more than 2 years unless it was someplace where I could keep contracting to make up the difference for those years. Just contracting, I'm in the 150's now, luckily.

Thoughts from some of the Omni people for someone like me?

 

Packrat,

You are correct in there is a fixed based simulator before the full-motion. And I would agree you should know your stuff before you get to the full-motion. However, what I was referring to, and obviously didn't communicate very well, was day one of the fixed sim you're expected to know everything; there is no real training, just evaluations. During ground when asked about CDU training the company response " don't worry, the instructors will teach you everything you need to know". That simply isn't true.

If the training is so good and the instructors are so willing to help, then how is it that majority of a recent class quit?

FL450 - You're the type, Hillary type, who attacks anyone who doesn't agree with you. Good Luck with that. And to reply to your future response - blah, blah, blah, blah.

 

Well said, Sir. The word "professionalism" comes immediately to mind. International wide body and major airline flying are the big leagues and you'd better be ready to perform.

 

I am no fan of Omni or FL450 but what he is saying is 100% right. 99.99% of the guys in Omni ground school have at least one type rating and have been in a ground school before. All FMC/CDU work about the same, you should have a general understanding day one of FTD. Also you have a month to a month and half form the start of ground school to the first FTD, you should be 90% on flows and 100% on imitations. It isn't that hard, sorry maybe this career isn't for everyone.

 

To tell you the truth my ATR ground school was 1000x harder than Omni ground school. It was one of the easiest ground schools I have ever been in out of the 7 long terms. They tell you on day one what they expect from you and give you the tools to get it done.

 

Not many are fans on FL450 but at the end of the day I just show up and do my job, depending on who you talk to. I do appreciate be76flyer's honesty and when I see him in person will still shake his hand. As mentioned above the ATR ground and sim was 1000 times harder than anything I've seen at Omni.

Happy Landings

FL450

 

Not factual at all. I just went through a few months ago and none of our class had that experience. It is true that you are expected to have a good working knowledge of flows and procedures/profiles. But that is just chair flying in front of the paper trainer. My sim partner and I spent 2 weeks prior to FTDs going through that stuff. And while it all didn't click while we were doing it in practice beforehand, it all came together in the FTDs and Sims. That's a normal way of training. No airline wants to spend $$$ for valuable sim time walking you through a flow step by step. Have a rough knowledge, polish in the sim. It's pretty standard training practice.

I will say though that the people without any FMC experience did have a more challenging time. So previous FMC experience helps significantly.