dovic91

The pay and work rules at C5 are well known, or at least they should be by now. There are other little gems that don't get discovered until one gets in the door though. Training is not AQP, but they say they are working on it. To say that the training is poor would be generous. To be fair, there are some great instructors, but they are hampered by a poor syllabus written mostly by people who never flew jets before. "It's how we did it on the Dash" is a common answer when asking why things are done a certain way. They advance pilots to be LCPs with only 100 hours of PIC time in the aircraft they fly. The base chief pilots all have little time in the 145. One isn't a captain yet, and one doesn't even have a type rating in the only airplane the company flies. Pilots from other now closed airlines have moved to C5 in the past year and have tried to bring their knowledge base along. It's like pulling teeth to get the legacy C5ers to learn. All of the whining and complaining when procedures were introduced that prohibited the use of pitch mode on initial climb was very indicitive of the low skill level of many. Equally as telling was the uproar over a recent change requiring the pilot flying to guard the flight controls when below 10,000 ft with the autopilot on. Don't ask anyone who hasn't been trained somewhere else how to fly an RNAV arrival. They quite simply don't teach anyone how to use the FMS at C5 and consequently nobody "trusts" the VPI because they don't know how to set up the FMS. Fortunately, I was able to move along a short time ago, with my certificate intact. So yeah, there are more reasons besides rock bottom pay and a joke of a contract.

Sloneckozzz

Lol. This guys is funny


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flippedr6

There is not a single thing in that post that was inaccurate. A lot of the guys that came from xjt are bailing in droves out of that airline. Not to mention anyone else that can is as well. 40 something resignations with 9 show up to training in Dec.

jacburn

What makes them funny? Do you have anything to add to the conversation or just cute little comments all over the forums?

core4isb2

Absolutely nothing in that original post was inaccurate. Nothing! At least that's the way it was when I left a few months ago.

I will explain my background first, for some context. Retired USAF V22 guy. I had a break in service back in 2008-2009 and tried 121 then before the bottom fell out. Went back on active duty and picked up almost where I left off. Retired in 2019, but my last tour was a staff tour. V22 time didn't/doesn't do much for 121 totals, so I decided to go to another regional. Picked ExpressJet due to the reputation of their training department. Ultimately, that turned out to be a bad decision, but the training was excellent. On par with most of what I received on active duty.

Everyone knows what happened to Expressjet. I still wanted to fly and in early 2021, there was only one regional hiring so I figured I would give it a shot again. Almost immediately, I could tell I was dealing with an entirely different animal. As was mentioned above, the training syllabus was horrible. I won't get into the relative inexperience of most of the instructors because each of them did the very best they could. Anyway, we spent an inordinate amount of time covering 17347 and paper weight and balance. Almost nothing was taught about the autopilot or FMS, and that was throughout ground school, GFS, and sims. We had some 1500 hour CFI guys in my class and I wondered how and when they were going to learn this stuff. Short answer: they didn't.

Fast forward to flying the line.... Almost none of the captains I flew with knew how to really use anything other than basic FMS functions. More importantly, none wanted to learn from a lowly FO either. All arrivals were flown by diving and driving to the bottom of each altitude window and slowing to the crossing speeds many miles before the actual fixes. I used the techniques learned previously whenever I could, but most of the captains would object whenever I briefed it that way. "You can't trust the VPI" is what I was told over and over. One guy had a cow when I cross tuned the #1 comm radio from the RMU on my side of the plane. Almost all climb out were done in pitch mode and 95% of the landings were done at flaps 22. "That's the way we do it here" was the answer when asking why. Dude, there's 5 knots of wind, straight down the runway!!!!!

On the flip side of the coin, I did get to fly with a few captains that came from other places. Those guys/gals flew the airplane better and knew the automation well. I didn't get to fly with them much for some reason though. What hastened my desire to leave was flying down to Mexico with C5. That was some downright scary $hit! Fortunately most of the old C5 guys avoided Mexico like the plague and I flew down there most of the time with guys who had previous experience and training flying in mountainous terrain. United took the Mexico flying away for a while, but I heard it's back now. Again, scary $hit with this outfit. I finally made it out with nothing broken after only having to file a few ASAPs. Anyone thinking of going to C5, for whatever reason, realize that there's more at stake than just United pulling the plug.

Morethantime

I’m feeling a bit hedley today. So I’m just gonna actually comment for once on something I have no business commenting on since I have no skin in the game. You xjt people seem so sour about Commutair. Move on.

dovic91

Nah, I think most are sour because United took a gamble to save a few bucks and awarded the flying to a sub-standard outfit. That isn't working out so well. As far as moving on goes, most already have. My post was merely to let people know that there were other reasons to avoid the place besides the obvious.

Pilotchute

I will bite Dovic91. I was at C5 for a number of years and will start with things I agree with you on. Yes they did bang on about 17347 way too much and I don't know why. They also did a lot of paper w&b because in PQI you had to do a paper w&b so moot point.

I did use pitch mode but only occasionally. It was good for being able to adjust your climb rate without FLCH wallowing you like a seal hunting for 240 knots in turbulence.

I only ever landed flaps 22 unless it was gusty or I was unfortunate enough to be flying an LR. I don't know what you mean about "only basic functions of FMS". The FMS in a 145 has no VNAV or parallel track so what is there to know? I flew a G1000 Cessna 172 with more functionality. I don't know who these Capts were you flew with who would dive and drive everywhere and don't trust the VPI. I think you are using a very occasional thing and making it out to be normal.

I had not heard "that's how it was done on the dash" for a very long time (probably 2019)

As for Mexico it's pretty much follow the VPI all the way from cruise altitude to the field. Did you ever fill out an incident report or contact pro standards about any of this"dangerous Mexico flying"? If you didn't then it sound like you are painting C5 to be a little worse than it really is.

If you wanna talk about crap management, poor scheduling or not wanting to pass a new contract I can go on all day.

Express jet had flown the 145 for 20 years and had a training department that were lifers. You can't compare the two

LimaF

Out of curiosity what is so scary about Mexico flying at C5??? Didn’t go there with C5 but have been many times with no problems.

JediCheese

I hadn't been a FO at C5 for a while so no idea what other CAs were doing.

Personally, the FMS was a POS and I'd not trust it with my certificate and instead calculate out a 3 degree glideslope myself. Doubly true if there were speed restrictions on an arrival. Since you are so eager to teach, how about teaching me how to manually program an altitude window into the FMS (not just above/below, the actual window)?

Landing flaps 45 or 22 was meh (as long as you have runway). I think the flaps 22 thing was an XJT/TSA thing rather than a C5 thing. If I remember the manuals correctly, the preferred flaps was 45 but it's been a bit and I've brain dumped it.

I hated the pitch mode change. When hand flying it, you could actually hand fly it instead of following the flakey command bars (no, I'm not going to pitch up 20 degrees to lose 5kts of excess airspeed!).