DarkSideMoon

Good for you. Most newbies aren’t flying light twins and retracts these days. The autopilot isn’t going to hit the departure windows out of ORD on a hot day in a -200. Or successfully capture a localizer more than half the time. Maybe the more automated aircraft can do it but it still requires proper SA and automation management.

You have to be a great GA IFR pilot to do well at training but it doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to get through. I’ve seen it. Some people just can’t handle the speed and the crew environment.

rickair7777

Mems & Lims, know cold before you show up.

Flows too, but be aware these will make a lot more sense once the systems are explained and/or you see it done live in an MFTD. Don't beat your head against the wall trying to understand and momorize flows if what they gave you doesn't make sense. Use that energy on Mems & Lims. If you have access to videos showing the flows, that will help a lot.


I tend to study better alone. I remember things a lot better if I understand them, so sometimes I need to stop and do research rather than press "I believe" and move on. Blessing and a curse, but at the end of the day I know it pretty cold, even if getting there was more involved. If the group study is a distraction for you, do what you need to do.

That said, I always participate in some group study, that way you don't miss any tribal knowledge items which get tossed around. You will need to practice flows and profiles with your sim buddy, no way around that.

I also participate in some social activities, just for decompression and to stay in the loop. But if you're under the gun, maybe limit it to Friday night and don't set yourself up to lose Saturday to a hangover. Just because some people do it, doesn't mean you can, or should. Just because someone else thinks he can get away with it doesn't mean he will (unless he already has the type rating... that guy you want as your sim buddy but not your drinking buddy).

tomgoodman

I would offer my advice, but it has been so long since I learned anything that I forgot how I did it.

Taco280AI

Just have great study habits. Pay attention in class, study after you get back to the hotel. Only you will know how much you need to study. Weekends are yours, take them off - except Sunday night. That's study time again. Try it in a group, see if it works for you. I prefer to study on my own, less distraction.

njd1

Speaking as someone who passed all training on schedule for an E170 type rating and ****ed up the checkride...I'll just say this:

Indoc is trivial. Show up, drink your favorite stimulants to stay awake, and you'll pass.

Systems is also easy if you have a semi-technical mind. I've made my living in engineering so this stuff was straightforward if not trivial. I noticed some people did have issues with the volume of the information if not the complexity. Fortunately they no longer insist you "build the airplane". This phase of training is more about rote memorization than anything else. Study and you'll pass the systems written and ultimately the oral.

Most quits / washouts occur prior to the checkride because the instructors can quickly figure out who is hacking things and who isn't. My class lost a couple guys in procedures training and then several more early on in sims. I experienced this up close. My sim partner was assigned to me and not long into procedures training it was painfully obvious my sim partner's experience level really did not mesh well with the demands of airline flying.

HIs basic communications skills and briefings were painful to listen to, he couldn't translate a holding clearance into the FMS to save his life, and he tended to get very frustrated when he couldn't figure this stuff out. He almost quit in the third procedures training session. We later wasted a lot of my sim time getting him to the lesson completion standards. Of course I did my part to help him and I talked him off the ledge more than a few times, only to have him quit a few sims in.

Fortunately I was given a seat fill for the remaining lessons so I was able to recover some of the lost time but I still had gaps in my training that the instructors didn't catch before the checkride. They just kept checking the boxes. Easy to do at 3:30AM when they admit they just took a 10mg melatonin and needed to get back to the hotel soon.

My problem was that although I brought an ATP and a lot of hand-flown IFR experience, 30+ years with Jepp charts, and probably 600 hours of flying with a crew, the reality is flying a jet (even a heavily automated Ejet) was radically different than the stuff I had been flying. A major contributing factor was that I got a ****ty sim schedule (10PM-2AM and often 3AM trying to bring my sim partner up to speed) that wound up causing a ridiculous sleep deficit that caused me to be in a fog by the time I had to do my checkride 12 days in.

I must admit I've been tired a million times in my life but had never been truly fatigued so I didn't recognize the symptoms in time. I learned the hard way that fatigue has no obvious trigger like drinking a beer or taking a benedryl. I should not have been anywhere near that sim on the day of my checkride. But the guilt set in as well...."who calls in fatigued in training?" Oh, and while I used to find that "housekeeping" sequence in the "Living The Dream" video funny, I no longer do, because it's the reason I got maybe 4-5 hours of useful sleep every day after hitting the pillow at 4AM.

While I recognized during the last few sims that my performance on certain maneuvers lacked the consistency I would normally like to see before going for the checkride I was so fatigued I simply didn't want to argue with the instructors who all said I was progressing normally. It was also hard to argue with them when they told me "the APDs don't expect you to be perfect...if they think you are otherwise able to fly the thing they'll drop their pen if you goof". The first thing out of my APD's mouth during the checkride prebrief? "You know how you pass the checkride, right? You fly perfectly". If the APD dropped his pen on my checkride I certainly didn't see it happen.

I did a lot of research before I decided to try my hand at 121. What I didn't figure out in time is that airlines train to failure, not to proficiency, and they are all too happy to push you through because if you fail they have dozens more people just like you ready to take your place and the investment they make in training a pilot through the checkride is a trivial cost to them in the grand scheme.

I was fortunate in that the training I received and the instructors that provided it were generally top notch -- I just didn't get enough training to polish off my skills before the checkride. Keep in mind that a training failure is far more likely, regardless of what you bring to the table or how you apply yourself, if the quality of training sucks as it does at some carriers...who are represented on this board but will remain nameles. The risk to your career is too great to waste it on a ****ty airline, so just don't go there.

DiveAndDrive

Thanks for the review, NJD. It’s just a little scary seeing the “fly perfectly” mentality at our airline. I’ll be in the sims in December. If you don’t mind my asking, would you be willing to PM me the details of your bust? I’m trying to get a feel for the “gotchas” and chairfly where people find difficulties.

njd1

No need for PM. Everyone can benefit.

I should say up front that if you screw up one thing on the checkride, the checkride is officially busted. If you make an error, and then correct it (assuming it's correctable... not all screw ups are), there is a possibility that the examiner will call it a "debrief item" and simply talk about it afterward.

If you bust a maneuver fairly early in the checkride most if not all examiners will give you an opportunity to continue the checkride and complete as many maneuvers as possible. As long as you're the kind of person who can let go of the failure and get on with the business of flying the airplane (and all pilots really should have the mental discipline to do this by the time you get to the airlines), I recommend you do this, as it will minimize the number of things you have to do on the recheck. And take it from me -- you REALLY want to minimize your exposure on a recheck, because if you screw that up, you won't need to stick a fork in yourself to know you're done.

1) Make sure you do as many published missed approaches as you can get in training. To keep things moving instructors will tend to want to have you on a heading straight out (or nearly so) on each missed, and when single engine they will actually encourage you to request alternate missed approach instructions for a straight out departure. That works until the examiner says "unable" or you're so busy you forget to ask for alternate instructions. I did precisely one published missed in the last Sim (mock checkride). That was a instructor / training oversight I did not catch because I was half asleep that week. Guess what maneuver caused my initial bust?

The reason published missed approaches are a bit challenging is that the ****ty Honeywell AFCS of this $30M airplane is too stupid to realize you're below Vfs and hence bank angle has to be limited so you can't just call "FMS NAV" at 400 feet and follow the FD as that will lead to excessive bank angles (which would be a bust, if you hadn't guessed). You effectively need to fly the initial missed approach segments in HDG mode. Of course according to SOP you can't touch the guidance panel yourself without the AP on so you have to call out the headings you need. You could ask for FD off to avoid the distraction and fly raw data but trust me when I say that is harder than it sounds when new to the airplane so I don't recommend it.

2) Do not forget the "set missed approach altitude" call on your approaches, as that will set you up for a failure on the missed approach (think altitude bust).

3) V1 cuts are surprisingly easy to get right and then get horribly wrong in the E170. This is the only maneuver in the airplane that tricked me into believing I had mastered it initially, only to screw it up later in training and before the checkride. Part of my overconfidence probably came from observing my sim partner, who required five attempts to get one right. He crashed the sim (red screen) the first four times. I required three attempts to avoid bank angle warnings but I never crashed.

The main message of V1 cuts is that they are almost completely flown with rudder - not ailerons. Resist the urge to correct bank angle with ailerons. Yes, you can do it, but the yoke has to be rapidly "pulsed" in the desired direction. If you try to apply a smooth control input in the required direction as you were likely trained to do by this point, that will give time for the spoilers to come up and bad things will happen (think PIO) as you try to correct the problem.

When I was having trouble with V1 cuts later in training a CA seat fill / instructor told me to sit on my hands (literally). Then he said "use rudder to keep it on track" and he used the backup pitch trim button on the console to rotate the airplane and keep it on the pitch command bar. It works.

BTW, even my 6000 hour time in type seat fill CA did a pretty gnarly V1 cut the first time he tried to demonstrate one to me. His second attempt was pretty good. As both he and the instructor admitted, we all suck at these because we never do them. Same with published missed approaches or go-arounds. Apparently the average crew goes around 3 times a YEAR at this company. And when was the last time you ever were ever asked to fly anything but runway heading on a missed (particularly single engine)? Yea, I thought so.

4) Flaps/Slats failure. One of the more challenging manuevers as it is typically set up on a non-precision approach (LOC) and you're approaching at ~185K and 1000 FPM down, which is dangerously close to the GPWS limits. If you screw up and don't stay on the glidepath, attempts to correct closer to the runway may result in a GPWS warning (SINK RATE). Get one and correct, you're okay. Get two, you bust.

Note that if you screw up and go around that is okay as it's considered good judgment. One seat fill / CA told me that if you see 3 white on the PAPI you should be primed for a go-around. This can be salvaged if you're really on the mark, but 4 white means a go-around always as you will never be able to increase the angle of descent sufficiently without the GPWS *****ing, i.e. you'll probably need 1200-1400 FPM to correct and that won't work).

5) Visual approaches. I never got to this as it's typically the last maneuver on a successful checkride, but a classmate busted his initial checkride on this maneuver. He hadn't yet realized, as I had earlier in training, that at least in this phase of your training you need to keep the autopilot on until you're aligned with the runway and at your calculated TOD point as it is surprisingly easy to fixate and lose altitude awareness. Then you can disconnect and then put the top tip of the FPV on the horizon bar to get your 3 degree GS. Remember to keep up your scan both inside and outside the airplane. If you fixate, you're done.

BTW, you'll need to do the math in reverse (cleared the visual at 2500 feet means 2500 / 3 ~= 8 = start down at 8 miles out) to get on the correct GP before you use the FPV trick.

Summary:

Flying in the face of the mantra "train as you fly, fly as you train", they'll impose lots of stupid restrictions on you during your checkride, like your 10000 hour CA is dumb and dutiful. If you tell him to go FLAPS 5 at 250K he'll do that. And you'll bust. Most seat fill CAs try to work around this idiocy and give you hints, but there is a strict limit to what they can do. FYI, in AQP recurrent, this is not the case and you're judged not as an individual but as a crew. CRM is actually encouraged and you are allowed to pass if your crew partner catches your errors. Why the hell this isn't the standard for a checkride in an airplane that requires two pilots is beyond me.

Concrete example: on the visual approach in the real world normally you would ask your PM to load the approach for the runway so you could use the GP or GS as a vertical path reference. TOO BAD SUCKER, you can't do that on the checkride. You could then ask the PM to bring up the runway in the FMS, which will give you DME to the threshold and most examiners will let that slide. If the examiner is in a ****y mood because he just had $4000 worth of camping equipment stolen out of his car at the hotel in the ****hole otherwise known as STL (yea, true story) and he denies that too, you can use the DME to the ARP (airport reference point, or center of the airport) and go through the mental gymnastics to calculate the correction to the threshold. Oh, and did I mention that the examiner has the option of turning off the PAPI even if it exists at the simulated airport? Remember to keep the touchdown spot steady in your field of view like you always have.

My advice to anyone who is a bit nervous about making the huge leap to airline flying, particularly if this is your first jet, is to go to a company that uses AQP initial. There is no official checkride....just maneuvers validation. You can have a brain fart and screw up, but as long as you can demonstrate the maneuvers to standards before time is up you pass. And that's exactly the way it should be. Had I been given that opportunity I'd be flying the line right now rather than scheduling interviews and wondering whether I'll ever make it to the LCCs or Majors.

wrxpilot

Thanks for the write up. I have to say, as someone that spent 7+ years at the regionals (three as a captain), it really seems like your ride was a bit over the top. Failures would probably be well over 50% if everyone had to deal with your APD.

njd1

I can't give you actual numbers as I was told them in confidence by an instructor and they are proprietary information but initial checkride failures are disturbingly high at my former company. Your number is frighteningly close to the real number. And the washout rate in my class (last I checked since I left) was close to 30%.

Around the time my sim partner was throwing up his hands in procedures training I pulled the instructor aside and asked how things were going in the industry and at the company. He said that they are seeing more failures as they are now forced to recruit people whose time consists mostly of guiding students around the patch or doing VFR jobs like skydive ops, neither of which, in his opinion, properly prepare a pilot for the demands of airline flying or a jet. Not long ago, he said they wouldn't call anyone back unless they had 3500+ hours and 1000 turbine, at which point they typically only provided 4-6 sim sessions of training + checkride. They now provide 8 for training plus the check and LOFT (for a total of 10). And people still aren't getting through that.

Oddly, our indoc instructor said as recently as a year ago the company had a "itchy trigger finger" and would terminate people before they would provide more procedures training or sim sessions to get them to the line, but they supposedly changed their tune as management realized they were paying for a bulk of the training of the pilot only to have them go to the competition, polish off their technique in the very same sims, and get to the line. From my perspective, nothing has changed. What's that they say about a tiger and his spots?

DiveAndDrive

Excellent write up. Thank you so much for the input!! I appreciate it.