And so it starts.

Almost 2 months to the day after beginning training, I'll finally be flying the real thing. My IOE (initial operating experience - I fly around with a check airman for the first 25 hours or so) starts in a few hours. I really get tossed into the deep end on my first day because we have a 6 leg, 8 hour flying time, 14 hour duty day that has us making 4 quick turns and a short layover in our base in the Midwest. This will be followed by a 5 leg day and a reduced rest overnight on night 2 with an early morning departure (6am show time) back to our base in the south followed by a deadhead back to the motor city.

It'll be nice to finally fly again. I'll write more about it later this week after I have a few hours under my belt and can actually speak from some experience about the line.

Type rating #3

Ahhhhhhh. It feels good to be done. All this studying, all this time away from home, just for one thing, to pass the dreaded checkride. Its like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I can finally relax a bit. It feels great to have passed the checkride and become an official employee and airline pilot, but the greatest thing about passing, is now I can go home!!!!!!!! That was my primary motivation to keep me going and keep me focused. All I really cared about was finishing as fast as I could so I could go home. If the training schedule was left to my sadistic thought process, I would have gone to class 7 days a week, gone straight into Goofus sessions, done the sim's on consecutive days with no days off and had the checkride tacked on immediately after finishing sim training. That alone would have dropped 3 weeks off. But thats just me.



Personally I think my training here was pretty good. I was lucky enough to pick a sim partner that has more time flying the CRJ than I have total time. He was lucky that he didn't get stuck with a rookie to jets. It worked out good for the both of us. Our sim instructors were top notch! Both Matt and Mike were honest, fair and extremely knowledgeable. Their instruction was invaluable when it came to the checkride. Both my sim partner and I were prepped and ready for anything the examiner threw at us.

I stopped by the training center yesterday and officially got my 3rd type rating added to my license. It feels good to be done, but will feel even better when I get home.

Almost done

Well its been a long......long.....very long time down here in the mid south and I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. After spending the past 49 days in training, my checkride is fast approaching. It cannot come soon enough. I am dying to go home. I miss my family and I've had enough of this place.

All our sim sessions went very well and I had a lot of fun learning the new jet. It fly's like the Falcon, but that's the only similarity. The cockpits are as different as they come. The Falcon is dirty, old, outdated and has steam gauges. The CRJ is new, semi-state of the art and a breeze to fly with the FMS and auto pilot. The procedures at the new company are vastly different. The hardest thing to learn was letting go of old habits. The auto pilots in the Falcons were very un reliable and I only used them as cruise baby-sitters. The A.P. in the CRJ is great. When coupled with the FMS, it'll do just about anything you want. Holds are a thing of the past. All you need to do is press a few buttons on the FMS and "presto!" it'll do it for you. Situational awareness is dramatically enhanced as compared to the Falcon. Now I have a moving map display of where I am, where I'm going and where I'm going next. Its great. I've finally learned to trust the auto pilot and let it do the work.

Thankfully there are only a few more days left. After the checkride I have to do a L.O.F.T flight, walk around and 4 fam flights (flight were I just sit in the cockpit and watch) then I'm released to do my O.E (operational experience, I fly with a check airman for 25 hours) then I'll be released to the line. I'm hoping that after the fam flights I can go home. Hopefully in a weeks time I'll be at home, sleeping in my own bed next to soon to be wife.

The Flight Simulator

Its finally time to go have some fun. The flight profiles have been memorized, checklists burned into long term memory, flows burned into muscle memory and call outs that can be spit out in my sleep. Put this all together and you have a pilot ready to step into the hot box.



Some guys (like my sim partner) loath the sim. They hate getting engine failures, V1 cuts, fires, single engine approaches, stalls, go arounds and hand flying the plane. I am at the other end of the spectrum, I love it. I get to go in there and do what I do best, fly the plane. A funny part about my training so far is that I'm getting chastised a little bit by the instructor because I don't use the auto pilot enough. Typically after takeoff and you are climbing through 600ft agl, the normal call is "auto pilot on". I am hand flying as much as I can and usually don't turn "Otto" on until the instructor tells me to, or we get busy in the cockpit trying to fix something or prepare for an approach. Another airlineism I need to get used to is calling for things on the flight control panel. I'm so used to doing things myself that I find myself reaching up and setting things that I am not allowed to touch when I'm hand flying. For example, if I'm hand flying and ATC gives us a new heading, I cant reach up and turn the heading bug to the new heading, I have to ask for my sim partner to set it. I think I'd learn my lesson if the instructor was sitting in the back seat with a yard stick and gave my hand a whack every time I went to reach for something I wasnt supposed to touch. I had to laugh tonight when I read my comments from the instructor. He wrote in big bold letters "HANDS OFF THE FCP WHEN HAND FLYING". We joked about it during the debrief. I suppose I could make things easy on myself and just use Otto more, but whats the fun in that? The airlines are trying to turn me into something I really don't want to be, a button pusher.

I gotta tell ya though, flying glass is friggin sweet. This is a hellva lot easier than steam. It makes me a much better pilot. I'll get into the details of how glass is better in a later post. Here are some pics of the sim. They are a little blurry so I'll see if I can get some better pics.