CFI, no contest.

You mean people are still paying for those rj courses? You know they teach you all that stuff once they hire you, right?

I just interviewed at ASA and part of it was the sim eval, in a level D CRJ700 sim.

You hand fly it with raw data in the eval.

One of the guys in my interview group had just come from a week at ATP in Jacksonville and their CRJ course. He said that the course did little to prepare him, as there was virtually no hand flying on raw data during their training.

Working as a CFI will teach you about judgment, communication and observing in ways that are just incomprehensible.

This career is a long, hard road.

There aren't any shortcuts.

We had a couple in our interview that had a prep course too and they also said it was mostly about the automation that then didn't help them in the sim eval. You have to get the job before it matters if you can fly the autopilot, maybe ATP needs to figure that out.

Don't take a CRJ course. spend your money on something that'll last you your whole career. Besides, who knows, you may get a job flying a turboprop or ERJ. Murphy's law.

I wonder how many of us current RJ Pilots could pass that eval ;)

I say get your CFI....there is nothing difficult about flying the CRJ. Don't pay to learn it when the company will pay you to learn it. Flying the CRJ on the line is far easier than teaching was. But you need to sharpen your thought processes and mostly your instrument skills. One of the best ways to do that is to instruct. You don't have to do it forever...I did it for 10 months at got about 230 hrs of dual given out of it. When I got hired with XJ, I didn't have a ton of hours but I had more than the minimum. Instructing prepared me for the interview and the job.

But if you take the CRJ course you can be that guy in training who knows all the answers before the instructor asks the questions. He was cool.

Yep - he was way cool and we all invited him over to our rooms for beer every night :D

Seriously. Don't be that guy.

seriously.... it seems like this argument gets started up every 3 months

my opinion do the CFI deal, Knowledge gained through teaching and experience is better than a shortcut like a crj course.

CFI. Save your money.

You also need a healthy dose of determination and willpower to get through training.

Its not too hard to learn to fly the CRJ if you're a low time pilot coming from Cessnas and Pipers, but you need to study your heinie off to really understand how the systems and automation works. Your airline will teach you how they want you to learn systems and fly the CRJ. The CRJ course can't do that.

The guys who took the CRJ course in my class did not really have much of an advantage over the guys who didn't. Their wallets were just a little lighter.