As a former PSAer I can confirm what has been described in this thread concerning the training department. This was my 1st 121 experience although I have over 20 years of aviation experience in a Government non-military setting. I went through initial training with no problems. I did experience multiple instructors. Some good, some bad. I consider myself an above average pilot and a hard worker. So given the fact that I had subpar instruction to me just meant I had to work harder to be successful. I did and I passed initial with no problems. Fast forward to upgrade. Sim instructor was brand new. My sim partner and I were his 1st students for upgrade. Needless to say the sim sessions were just "check the box." Not much instruction taking place. However we both felt confident as we understood the process, maneuvers, and the plane. We drew JC as our APD. We both discussed calling out sick as a lot of people do when they draw him. However, we felt confident. Boy were we wrong! I made it about 1/2 way through before he informed me I had 3 strikes. Didn't bother to tell me what they were until the debrief. Two were very minor nit picky crap. The third was a QRH procedure that I ran EXACTLY like my instructor told me. Next was my sim partner. He failed him on the same QRH procedure and minor discrepancies. Everything thing that has been said about JC is spot on! Out of 16 guys in my upgrade class JC failed 4 of us. Wrap your mind around that. 1 APD failed 25% of a single upgrade class. I have since moved on to WN and the training I received was completely different! At PSA you felt like they the training Department was constantly looking for reasons to fail you. At WN it was the opposite. Much better instruction and instructors that were top notch and there to make sure you were successful. I rarely post on APD and just stumbled on this thread by accident. Am I bitter? Not really, I achieved my dream airline and life is good. My purpose in writing this thread is to help potential applicants make decisions. JC and others like him are prevalent at PSA. My training failure didn't effect me as I have a long resume of success in many facets of aviation. Might be different for a new young pilot. Choose wisely!

 

Worse training footprint, and instructors / examiners. had one instructor literally on his phone the whole sim session playing candy crush.. and now he is a LCA

 

That’s not true. Mesa initial pass rates are pretty low.

 

Excellent at multi tasking?

 

PSA has a lot of triggers, flows and calls. SA and energy mgmt are difficult for any student learning their first jet.

Usually a new hire has good triggers, flows and calls, but poor SA and energy mgmt. or they’re the opposite, they have good SA and Energy management, but drop triggers flows and calls.

Passing a check ride requires a mediocre amount of both. When the sim comes off motion they know it was a clean kill and they should have unsated, they’ll later talk to another student who was mediocre and didn’t unsat and that recalibrates them into thinking they should have passed.

The next move is to blame training department for not teaching energy management.

It’s a culture of students wanting to train to a gouge, things like “proper decent planning” are viewed as elective reading and “not on the test” as route memory required knowledge.

When they’re in the sim they want a gouge and scripted ride and become task saturated with the mildest changes.

An APD will give them a mild change for the sole purpose to observe energy management and SA and if they had read that “elective decent planning” their SA and energy management would be better and they would not drop triggers flows and calls.

Its also, literally whining like, “I got a hung start in training, and a hot start for checking, so unfair”

We’re you told to read about start malfunctions, and did you get a hot start in training in Dayton on the ground proficiency trainers?

They really believe they need full motion sim time for every start malfunction, and training on a proficiency trainer is worthless and doesn’t count. Also checking on anything not covered 24 hours prior for recency is a dirty move.


They are spoon fed in training, and on checking the bowl and spoon are put on the high chair in front of them. They have to now pick up the spoon and fed themselves and it’s just way different and some would rather sit there and cry.

I would bet my paycheck this clown spent more hours building a website to cry than he did studying for his career.

The 2 out of ten that fail are the same 2 that show up to recurrent and their first question is can they leave early for their commute, and their second question is this non-jeopardy or do I really need to pay attention.

 

If it is jeopardy I’ll still mostly talk and not listen, muddle though it, and hopefully when I complain about the company, union, or contract well find some common ground and he’ll be “cool” and not ****ed off I don’t prepare for anything.

Some of the students just don’t see patterns like the QRH coming out closer and closer to top of decent, or in the decent. If in training it came out right after top of climb, when they were leaning that is their expectation for checking.
Same thing for after takeoff, some how an altitude or nav change comes across the radio in the middle of their mediocre learned after take off flow. If the instructor would just wait until they say “after takeoff complete” like when they were leaning the ride would feel easier.

 

Every single DEC I have flown with all day PSA has WAY too much talking, especially on approaches, especially below 1000’

Everything is wordy.. I remember going through sims and felt like I was prepping for a Broadway show

Not to mention the call outs they want you to say are not even stated in the POH for some maneuvers or procedures… for example, calling out .2 prior, purely technique that everyone is taught but nothing in the POH says it’s required and I’m sure the examiners/LCA’s will ding you if you don’t say it

 

I've never heard of an examiner at PSA making up things to ding people on. On the one occasion I had a recurrent sim instructor say weird stuff, I explicitly pulled up in the manual where it clarifies things, and never heard another thing about it (and that was a very odd outlier, every other examiner I've had has been exceptionally standard).

 

LCA dinged a captain for not climbing the Econ number per the ACARS, and he was climbing at 290 since that’s what he was taught in sims.

 

PSA does do a lot of talking. Too much talking in opinion.