TiredSoul

Maybe you need to explain to us mere earthling mortals exactly what mystical skills it takes to cross the oceans with CPDLC and ACARS.......
We’re all waiting.

Twin Wasp

That’s the problem. While I enjoy hours of doing nothing except marking up a plotting chart on a published airway, there are times when CPDLC fails. Then what? Had a flight a couple years back, no answer on any of the HFs we were given. Dug up the ARINC page in the Jepps, looked out the window and picked a frequency. San Fran answered immediately and the FO had a priceless look on his face. “How did you do that?”

No, it’s no rocket surgery but when you have a training program that’s more of a differences class for pilots that have experience versus real training in international ops there’ll be problems.

TiredSoul

Agreed TW.
This is also why you’re a Captain and new hires start as...well...not Captains.
Maybe you can’t always pick the rest period that you want but that’s also why you get paid double of what the person sitting next to you gets paid.

BayBum4Ever

The checking center instructors do a great job with what they have to work with. However they are limited by the curriculum dictated by the higher ups. I have crossed oceans for years before GPS,CPDLC and ACARS and it is a lot of work, certainly doable by anyone trained on those procedures. CPDLC and ACARS are great until they stop working.

BayBum

Elevation

I respectfully disagree. We say we love the instructors because they're nice guys to us in day-to-day work. The guys in place also have a role in building new curricula and pushing to get that curricula approved. When you talk to these nice guys they all wring their hands and talk about how they are dealing with an untenable training situation, but there's nothing they can do. This a fundamental abrogation of their duties as instructors. A long time ago we knew this when we got our initial CFIs. The guys who are nice and getting us back to the hotel 2 hours early from class are as much of a problem as the managers who aren't approving or pushing through improvements to the curricula.

Ultimately, as the docket and interview transcripts show, our nice guys are more complicit in monstrous outcomes than our particular dweebs. We don't need to turn this place into a failure mill, but we do need all parties to hold themselves up to their ethical standard. That ethical break-down occurs with nice folks sharing a drink around the fire pit at the Hyatt House Blue Lagoon. The instructors are complicit in a crime that we all know about. This places our check airmen into an impossible position.

Con artists and cowards live and operate in grey zones. They inflate these grey zones by being good drinking buddies, doing folks favors, etc. Think about scam artists you've known outside of aviation. They all do the same thing. The people ripping off your elderly parents are all full of smiles and free coffee.

The FAA gets around this by publishing standards, issuing FAA 8900.1, approving FOTM and depending on the ethical and professional backbone of the people they certify. When we inflate that grey area by being buddies, having instructors text students, etc. we are inflating that grey zone. All of us who engage in this play a role in an ethical breakdown that's killing our crews and costing us business. Until we collectively address this, we're SOL.

Elevation

As an aside, I do mean I RESPECTFULLY disagree. I think you make a good point, but we make some dangerous over-simplifications when we concentrate blame on a few folks when an entire system is complicit.

Fillmore Slim

Exactly......had a similar experience in an LCF. Had to get an HF phone patch and problem solve real time. Got the same look from the other FO.......good job he said (he had no idea what had happened or how to rectify the situation). The PROBLEM is that when an entire crew of 2 or more get in the cockpit and no ones ever experienced the anomolies before, we'll end up with another really bad outcome. How many more have slipped through the cracks? How many Captains won't even take rest breaks anymore? Our collective global aviation experience dwindles as.more of the folks who were hired long ago continue to leave, only exasperating the situation. I wish I could offer a solution.

RyeMex

Once again, Elevation brings some critical insight into where our problem really lies.

I won't say that I haven't b****ed about the fact that we are hiring people with such little time and experience, but the fact of the matter is that the NTSB docket reveals some pretty problematic information about one of our former crew members, and the problem wasn't that he only had 1500 hours.

Additionally, I suspect that I'm not the only person who has flown with a captain or two here who have thousands of hours and many years of experience who still probably have no business being in the left seat.

Should Atlas be the place where you are given your first experience flying a jet? No. Is that really our biggest threat? No. Our biggest threat right now is what management is directing the training center to do, and the fact that it seems that some instructors are obeying. After all, JC just wants "bodies in seats".

Globemaster2827

More than a small amount of blame goes to DB for not being able to read a Mesa Training Record after hiring hundreds of Mesa pilots. I suspect she was less than honest in her interview and the FAA certainly made zero attempt to go up the chain of command to see why Atlas is hiring people like that in the first place.

Outside of Atlas the system needs to be reformed to where standardized training records are made automatically available for your interview. That would've ended CA's career and saved lives (including his...). I don't believe that even Atlas would've hired him had they known....

TiredSoul

The FAA is about ticking boxes and only about ticking boxes.
Nobody at the FAA would ever attempt to change anything for fear of making waves.
Examples?
Every NW36th street operator has a POI
Every scumbag 135 has a POI
Boeing has FAA oversight....