It was Day 2 and Death By PowerPoint had commenced. At all airlines across the country from the smallest regional operators to the largest international carriers, the first section of training is known as "Indoc" or indoctrination. Just like at most companies, it is the most bland of administrative exercises to include setting up your benefits and meetings with supervisors and various company departments as an introduction to your "piece of the puzzle." Aside from the occasional guest speaker, we all settled into our desks, notepad at the ready to ingest everything possible about the operations side of the airline.
In order to get certified by the FAA to be an airline, there are specific topics that must be covered in Indoc. They include...everything. There are dozens of manuals that detail how the airline operates, most of them non-specific to any single airplane, and we had to go over every single chapter of every single manual in slideshow format.
So, we sat for hours in class class going over the hundreds of chapters that comprise our "operating license" and other airline specific manuals. The following Thursday, a mere 8 days from the first day of class, we were sent home to study on our own.
The company has to give new pilots a minimum of a week to go over the computer-based training materials specific to each airplane. For me, with the wedding approaching, in order to fit me into the schedule and accommodate the life event, I was given almost a month. Upon returning, there were 3 class days of review to go over anything we may not have understood from the self-study and then a test. Aside from the two hours of studying every night, I often stayed in the building late to work on "flows."
While every airplane essentially flies the same, the supporting infrastructure is vastly different. In the 737, an aircraft designed in the 1950s, the systems logic surrounding the aircraft is very different from the ERJ, an airplane designed in the late 90s. If all I had to do was sit down in my seat at the runway and then get out once we landed, the training course would be simple and take a few days. It's everything else, the mundane preflight and taxi tasks that verify the proper operation of every component and system of the aircraft that takes a lot of time to memorize.
One of the nice things about working for a large, safety-minded corporation, is the money they invest in training. There are 4 levels of training devices available for my use in preparing me before I step foot into the real jet. The first, and most basic, is the "Paper Tiger." In each classroom, attached to the walls are posters of the cockpit. I had little use for this since they also sent us home a copy of those posters to use while studying.
The next step up is a sci-fi like computer trainer where most of the cockpit is on touch screen monitors oriented as if it were an actual cockpit. This is where I spent most of my time studying. You could touch the screen and actually see and hear what happens. This it the area where you iron out your flows.
A flow, you ask? A flow is a pattern in which you move your hands and eyes and is different depending on the task you are completing. For example, before landing, my left hand sweeps from the overhead to the throttles (Igniters-on, gear-down, flaps-set, speed brake-armed). The after starting engine flow is a circle shape (Electric-transfer, probe heat-on, anti ice-as req, air conditioning-on, APU-as req, subsystem test-complete). Once the flow is complete, it is quickly verified by reading from the checklist in the off-chance something in the flow wasn't completely normally.
The feedback in this "Procedures Trainer" is immediate. I spent hours practicing getting into an airplane that was completely shutdown and getting it ready for takeoff one flow at a time. At first, you read off the manual. Read a step, do a step, watch what happens. After doing that once or twice, you begin to hear and see what it is like to start up an airplane's systems. After a few tries, you start seeing a patterns and before you know it, what was taking an hour to do is now only taking 15 minutes.
The next step up is a full cockpit mock-up sitting in a room and by full-mock up, it looked like someone just sawed the front end off of a 737 and put it in a room. You could actually "fly" this flight training device, albeit not very easily. Unlike the Procedures Trainer, you could have a more realistic experience. Following 6 days in these trainers, an evaluation was completed to ensure I was familiar enough with the generic day-to-day procedures to adequately move on to the simulators where I finally got to learn how the ol' girl flies.
Following two weeks in the full-motion simulators, I passed two check-rides and was ready to finally take on the task of carrying passengers.
The company has to give new pilots a minimum of a week to go over the computer-based training materials specific to each airplane. For me, with the wedding approaching, in order to fit me into the schedule and accommodate the life event, I was given almost a month. Upon returning, there were 3 class days of review to go over anything we may not have understood from the self-study and then a test. Aside from the two hours of studying every night, I often stayed in the building late to work on "flows."
While every airplane essentially flies the same, the supporting infrastructure is vastly different. In the 737, an aircraft designed in the 1950s, the systems logic surrounding the aircraft is very different from the ERJ, an airplane designed in the late 90s. If all I had to do was sit down in my seat at the runway and then get out once we landed, the training course would be simple and take a few days. It's everything else, the mundane preflight and taxi tasks that verify the proper operation of every component and system of the aircraft that takes a lot of time to memorize.
One of the nice things about working for a large, safety-minded corporation, is the money they invest in training. There are 4 levels of training devices available for my use in preparing me before I step foot into the real jet. The first, and most basic, is the "Paper Tiger." In each classroom, attached to the walls are posters of the cockpit. I had little use for this since they also sent us home a copy of those posters to use while studying.
The next step up is a sci-fi like computer trainer where most of the cockpit is on touch screen monitors oriented as if it were an actual cockpit. This is where I spent most of my time studying. You could touch the screen and actually see and hear what happens. This it the area where you iron out your flows.
A flow, you ask? A flow is a pattern in which you move your hands and eyes and is different depending on the task you are completing. For example, before landing, my left hand sweeps from the overhead to the throttles (Igniters-on, gear-down, flaps-set, speed brake-armed). The after starting engine flow is a circle shape (Electric-transfer, probe heat-on, anti ice-as req, air conditioning-on, APU-as req, subsystem test-complete). Once the flow is complete, it is quickly verified by reading from the checklist in the off-chance something in the flow wasn't completely normally.
The feedback in this "Procedures Trainer" is immediate. I spent hours practicing getting into an airplane that was completely shutdown and getting it ready for takeoff one flow at a time. At first, you read off the manual. Read a step, do a step, watch what happens. After doing that once or twice, you begin to hear and see what it is like to start up an airplane's systems. After a few tries, you start seeing a patterns and before you know it, what was taking an hour to do is now only taking 15 minutes.
The next step up is a full cockpit mock-up sitting in a room and by full-mock up, it looked like someone just sawed the front end off of a 737 and put it in a room. You could actually "fly" this flight training device, albeit not very easily. Unlike the Procedures Trainer, you could have a more realistic experience. Following 6 days in these trainers, an evaluation was completed to ensure I was familiar enough with the generic day-to-day procedures to adequately move on to the simulators where I finally got to learn how the ol' girl flies.
Following two weeks in the full-motion simulators, I passed two check-rides and was ready to finally take on the task of carrying passengers.
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