I'm Done With Training and Now Just A Regular Old F/O!

11:45 PM - Thursday, Dec. 01, 2005
I'm Done With Training and Now Just A Regular Old F/O!

It’s been so long since I’ve written some folks might think I finally keeled (or crashed?!). Unfortunately, on the day of my first flight in the CRJ-200, I did get really sick. A nasty head cold that caused serious discomfort in my ears on the last descent into ATL. But prior to that all went very well.

After a fitful night’s sleep I awoke at 0345 for my first trip on IOE, or Initial Operating Experience. It’s a normal trip in the eyes of the passengers (poor souls!) but it’s designed to have a new F/O fly with a training captain, or a new captain fly with another instructor pilot. There is an awful lot to learn once we emerge wide-eyed from ground school and the sim, and the learning curve is steep. In some ways it’s even tougher than the original training was. The flying part is easy, but it’s the operations stuff and all the paperwork that hangs up the new hires. So, IOE is supposed to help us transition from Sim World to the Real World without too much pain.

My first trip was with a nice fellow named Chris. I took the 0430 hotel shuttle from the Red Roof to the airport so that I’d be there an hour early. We’re supposed to duty-in for work in ATL 1 hour before departure (45 minutes at outstations). But since it’s all new and scary, I wanted to be there early and get a jump on things. Unfortunately it was so early that not even the lights were on in the crew lounge! And Chris didn’t show up until the normal duty-in time, so I sat there for an hour in the dark (couldn’t find the light switch) feeling dumb in my shiny, obviously newly purchased uniform. Strangely though, I wasn’t nervous. I knew that I could fly this plane just fine, and chances are good that I’d be paired with a patient captain who’d show me the ropes and forgive my rookie errors. Thankfully, Chris was just the guy. He did the preflight inspection and some of the paperwork to save me time (the F/O works her butt off in this plane on the ground), and he also did most of the radio calls in the ATL ramp (you either get the calls right the first time or the controllers “punish” you by making you sit there past your scheduled push-back time. (Because if we get the plane to the destination early we make more money).

So, we handled all of the ATL stuff well, and Chris flew the first leg. We went to Newport News (PHF) for the first trip, and I was thrilled to see my buddy Scott, the Blackhawk instructor pilot and fellow classmate, walk out to hop a ride back to ATL with us in the jumpseat! He was there for my first landing and it was fun to have him along. The flight went well and I was delighted to grease it on the runway, smooth, in the touchdown zone and exactly on the centerline. (Beginner’s luck?)

The rest of the day went well, to Lexington and back, despite the copious amounts of mucus flowing from my nose. My flight bag was growing more and more full of disgustingly used tissues! And by the fourth descent back into ATL my ears were killing me. I knew I was coming down with a cold but was embarrassed and told Chris that it was probably just allergies. But I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish the 3-day trip and might as well get off in ATL and call crew scheduling. I was mortified to have to call in sick on my very first day of work, but I learned a hard lesson while at the PanAm Academy in Florida. Flying with a head cold can not only ruin a girl’s eardrum, but it can destroy her flying career. And I worked too hard over the last few months to have it all come to a screeching halt on my first day!

Thankfully scheduling was very understanding and took me off the schedule for the next few days. I took the bus back to The Roof, crawled into bed, and there I remained for the next 2 days. Eventually I decided to flood my system with non-drowsy cold meds, pack the car with stuff I wouldn’t be needing over the coming weeks and make the long 9-hour drive back to RIC to be sick in my own bed with my sweetie there to cater to my every whim.

My next trip came a few days too soon and I was still concerned about my ears and the head cold. But uncomfortable though it was, it wasn’t painful and it got better as the trip went on. My new captain was a petite little woman by the name of Amy. And I was really eager to be an all-woman crew (chances were good that we’d have a woman flight attendant). We were scheduled to fly about 19 hours in the next 3 days, and I was nervous about being able to keep up. She was far less easy-going than Chris was, and she demanded much more of me. I always get a bit intimidated around female supervisors, and this was no exception. Our first day was a bit flat and all-business, though I was hoping we’d hit it off and have lots to talk about in cruise flight and at dinner. The second day she did warm up a bit and we enjoyed a leisurely meal in a little Italian joint in Meridian, Mississippi. We’d flown through a miserable cold front and nasty cells. The turbulence was heavy and the lightning prevalent. It was funny to watch the faces on the passengers as they deplaned, realizing that it was the likes of us little ladies that navigated them safely through the weather and to their destination, only slightly behind schedule. By the third day we were getting tired and I was frustrated with my ability to keep up with grounds ops in ATL. My flying was great, my landings were great, and I even handled the 35-knot gusting cross-wind into Wichita well. But as the day wore on and the legs ticked by, I was loosing steam.

On our last push-back from the gate in ATL Amy told me, “Engine Start Check List to the Line, Turn Two.” Which meant I was to push a bunch of buttons in preparation to start the right-hand engine. It was dark outside, and we had only the APU (a mini third engine used for electricity, engine starting and air conditioning) running all of the electrics/heating in the plane. It was the only source of power at that point. Its Off button sits precariously close to the Engine Ignition button and looks identical (except the label). So I reached up to start the engine and accidentally shut off the APU. The plane immediately went silent and all the lights extinguished. Our pax were now sitting back there in the dark, and since the tug driver had pushed us back we were now blocking the alley way and unable to communicate with Ramp Control. Amy was pissed, to say the least, and I was humiliated. We eventually reestablished power, re-ran the checklists and told the passengers over a PA that it was a small glitch, we apologized for the inconvenience and promised to have them on their way soon. And the rest of the flight we sat in silence, only talking when operationally necessary. Personally, I thought it was an honest error and one that had probably happened a few times to her as an IOE instructor.

Wrong. I was the only one ever (in years of instructing) that had inadvertently killed all electrical and hydraulic power to the entire aircraft while there were pax on board, in the dark. Ever. Absolute mortification. But despite the 2 mostly silent legs out and back to ATL, during the debriefing she told me that I reminded her a lot of herself. And that I’m awfully hard on myself, and though that brings about change sometimes I just need to forgive myself and move on. Roger that. I’m slow, but I am learning that lesson over time (and I’m much better than I used to be!).

The next trip was another 3-day with a young cocky guy by the name of Ian and his flirty flight attendant Nicole. The first day wiped me out (another 5-leg day) and by the time we got to the hotel at Meridian, MS I was ready to hit the sack. So, I disappointed them and took on the role of “slam clicker” (slam the hotel door, click the lock) and skipped dinner. The second day dawned with bad weather all over the place, and as a result of getting so behind in our schedules they canceled 2 of our 4 legs. Not until after we’d spent 5 hours killing time waiting for our inbound flights. Eventually we hopped aboard the aircraft and headed to Des Moines, Iowa for the night. By then the 3 of us were “gelling” and having a good time teasing each other and playing around. When we got to the airport, we talked the hotel van driver into dropping us by the local convenience store to get some beer, and then we headed back to my room. Until 5:00 in the morning! Obviously adhering to the “8 hours from bottle to throttle” rule with the alcohol but we didn’t get much sleep.

Our morning came early as we departed for Atlanta yet again. It was mostly clear and the mean cold front from the night before was by then well east of us. We managed to stay on schedule and head off to Houston more or less on time. The descent over the city was beautiful and I took lots of photos. The flight back to ATL from HOU was also nice, and since we had about 2 hours to cruise in boredom at altitude, Ian and I messed around with my digital camera. I’ve included some of the photos on my .Mac website.

Amazingly I was able to hop a flight home to RIC the following morning (after hanging out with Ian for a few hours at Spondivits, the local bar across from the Red Roof). I hauled my stuff over to my new crash pad, a little mini kid's bed in the basement of Walt’s grungy ATL Crash Pad House. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers and the price is sure right!

So, I’m officially released from training to “fly the line” just like all the other F/O’s. I love the plane, have flown with some great folks, think the company is a huge improvement over my last place of employment and am enjoying Atlanta. Jeanne landed a great job down here recently and we’ll be spending the Christmas holidays with a moving van and a new house full of boxes! It appears that the RIC house will sell and close quickly, and we’ll spend a month or two in an apartment in ATL to figure out where we’d like to live.

I’ll endeavor to update this website from time to time, and will continue to post pictures on my .Mac website as well.

Happy Holidays and do stay in touch, eh?

Cheers!
E.

I'm now really an airline pilot!

9:24 PM - Sunday, Nov. 01, 2005
I'm now really an airline pilot!

CRJ-200 Checkride

Whoohooo! Finally, after nearly 9 weeks of living in the freaking Red Roof Inn and wracking every little cell in my brain, I can check off that “airline pilot” box. I remember back about 10 years ago, when I was a junior or so in college, I first had the notion that this would be a box I’d someday want to check off. I was attending Context Associated’s “Pursuit of Excellence”. Actually, I’d completed the Pursuit, and spent a week at the next program, called “The Wall”. So a few months later I was sitting in a lecture hall, writing down the Top 100 Things I Want To Do In My Life. I still have that piece of notebook paper, jammed on both sides with outrageous ideas. And down about 10 from the top (right between “sky dive” and “Sing With Barbra Streisand”) was “a stint at airline pilot”. Ha! So the lessons I see in all this are – 1) be careful what you wish for, 2) be very clear about what you wish for, 3) write down your intentions, and 4) be as outrageous as necessary – anything is possible! (Though I should probably start with voice lessons if the Streisand thing is going to happen next!)

So the initial frustration of having our checkride postponed by 4 days is over. I definitely spazzed out, fearing that I’d forget everything I’d been trained to do in that plane between our last sim session and the checkride. But in the end it worked out. (Isn’t that how it works usually?) Steve and I both flew pretty rough at first, and we’re sure that the examiner took into account our training gap when he was trying to decide if we should be deemed official or not. But despite the little mistakes I made in the 2-hour flight, I proved that I did learn enough to be called “First Officer Recke”. (Yeah, thanks dad – great name for a pilot, I know….)

Our checkride started with about a 2-plus hour oral examination. Tony, our examiner, started with the first button on the overhead panel and worked his way down. We told him, tag-team style, what each switch/button/knob did from a systems perspective. And then we answered questions about the airplane’s limitations for awhile, before reciting a dozen or so memory items that have to be done in case of an emergency (rejected take off, cabin fire, asymmetric breaking, engine fire, etc.). When that was successfully behind us, we worked out a performance problem, proving that with certain failures on a snow-covered runway in Roanoke, VA (a “special” – read “treacherous” – airport in ASA’s eyes) with a certain load of passengers and baggage, that the plane would be able to take off from or abort safely on that length of runway under those atmospheric conditions. We ended up having to move a few pax from the front of the plane to the last few rows of seats to get the center of gravity balanced right, but it wasn’t a difficult problem. Then came the flight.

Steve and I decided I’d fly first from, the right seat, and he’d be my Pilot Not Flying from the left. Since we’ve both been F/Os in training we’ve had a little bit of negative learning going on since ½ of our training sessions have been in the captain’s seat. The good news is that I have a much better understanding of what it takes to become a captain, and I also have proved that I can land the plane from that seat (almost as well as from my own seat, interestingly).

So I had a normal take-off (which made us suspicious!) and then the onset of problems ensued. Engine failures, electrical problems, smoke in the cargo bay, autopilot failures, and smaller stuff that was easily handled. We flew a few monitored ILS approaches (like they were Category II, but the wx was Category I), and a couple of hand-flown non-precision (GPS) approaches, all into New York’s JFK (whose airport elevation happens to be 13’ above sea level, but I’ll get to that later). I stayed ahead of the plane, and managed to keep an eye on Steve, who was rarely ahead of it. My landings were decent, all close to centerline and within the touchdown zone.

Thankfully I made only a few little errors, and they were “nit-picky” things that were discussed in the de-brief post flight. However there was one big error that I made, and I wasn’t surprised. Visual approaches have been tricky for me all throughout training, and the one on my checkride was no exception. I was cleared for the visual approach back into ATL (we’d been shooting IFR approaches into JFK, elevation 13’). ATL’s airport sits just over 1000’ above sea level. So when you’re flying over the runway numbers just about to touch down, your instruments are reading very differently. But we don’t brief an approach for a visual, we just fly it. There is a certain protocol that must be followed, such as when to put down the first few degrees of flaps, and when to lower the landing gear, but it’s very subjective. Tony put me at 4000’ (about 3000’ above the ground) on a downwind and cleared me for the visual approach and the landing. I knew turning final that I was still too high, and although I had all the flaps and gear down to increase the drag and thus get lower faster, it still wasn’t going to work out. I dove for it (in a commercial pilot kind of a way, of course, not a Maureen Griggs kind of way) but knew about 2-3 miles out that it wasn’t going to happen. Fearing that I’d just messed up my checkride I told Steve (who was in charge of radio communications as Pilot Not Flying) to tell the tower that I was going to go around and that I needed vectors back for another stab at it. This time I flew the pattern at only 2000’, and was able to better plan the descent and landing to touch down exactly where I needed to be at just the right speed. End of checkride! And Tony commented, “Congrats, that was a satisfactory ride.” SO anti-climactic, eh?!

Then Steve flew, and from the very start he was rough. It was obvious that we had both been out of the sim for nearly 5 full days! He forgot to ask for the flaps to come up after his normal take off, so I asked him if he was ready. Then something else happened that he forgot to do, and I tried to make it quiet and just do it. But the examiner missed nothing. He told me to stop prompting him. So the next time Steve forgot something, I didn’t say anything but just handled it. And Tony then said, “Erin, if you don’t stop helping him I’ll fail you both!” And so it was. I thought Steve would make himself get ahead of the plane, knowing that I’d not be able to help him, but he barely managed to stay up with it sometimes. He just had a bad case of checkride-it is, and was rusty to boot. But there were moments when he seemed like he was going to pull it all together, and others when I wasn’t sure he was conscious over there. Eventually, and after an especially nice visual approach, he made his final landing (at which point neither of us was sure he’d passed). Tony leaned over between us, mumbled something about Santa Claus, and said, “Well, I suppose this was satisfactory….” Ugh. An auspicious beginning, but a beginning nonetheless!

The following day we had our LOFT flight, line-oriented flight training. It was much more of a training event rather than an evaluation, which was a good thing since we nearly became a lawn dart! In a LOFT event, the aircraft goes from Point A to Point B. Something we don’t get to do much of in Sim World, since we’re always practicing approaches and dealing with problems. Everything went fairly well, until Steve’s last approach into ATL. It was another dreaded visual, and it almost sucked us in. The visuals are a little unrealistic in the Day VFR setting in the sim. Near the big cities there are buildings, and the shorelines are accurate, but between cities and airports lies miles and miles of green nothingness. And it’s a bit hard to tell exactly how high we are or how far away from the airport we are. Thus, the near-lawn dart situation: we were cleared for the visual approach into ATL (elevation 1020’) after having practiced visuals into JFK (elevation 13’). We’d had the same problem the previous day on my checkride, but rather than being too low, I flew in too high to land. But Steve was far enough out on a straight-in approach and was descending lower and lower. Too low, it seemed to me, but I wasn’t sure (I’d loaded the visual approach wrong into the Flight Management Computer and we didn’t have the distance from the airport available). So I didn’t say anything. But after a few seconds it seemed like we were WAY too low, and the Radar Altimeter was agreeing with me. If my calculations were correct, we’d become a smoking crater in another 10 seconds or so. But that “First Officer’s Syndrome” was gripping me, and I kept trying to rationalize the problem. Either Steve wasn’t thinking clearly, or the RA was not functioning properly, or my brain was fried. Or any combination of the above. But another few seconds later it showed us at 300 feet above the ground and still a few miles out from the runway. So I spoke up, rather startlingly to Steve, and we averted a disaster. Weird how when something seems wrong, it’s still possible to not speak up, for various reasons. That’s how many accidents have made their way into the pages of NTSB reports….. Good lesson for me - again.

The good news is that now we have our “licenses to learn”, and the 7th is my first IOE (initial operating experience) trip. I have a 3-day trip with a fellow named Chris, followed by a 1-day trip with a fellow named Greg, and then the weekend off. And then I’m scheduled for another 3-day trip with a woman named Amy, which will be fun. With any luck that last trip will involve a woman flight attendant, making us an all-female crew! The IOE captains will keep me out of trouble and teach me the Real World in the CRJ. And about two weeks from now I’ll but just one of the rest of the F/O’s at ASA. Yippeee!

An Unexpected Delay -- Damit!

9:15 PM - Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005
An Unexpected Delay -- Damit!

I'm frustrated as hell. As you read in the last post, Steve and I flew well enough last night to get signed off to take our checkride. We were prepared to take it tonight or tomorrow at the latest. So imagine our surprise and frustration when we awoke to learn that our ride has been scheduled for 5 days from our last sim session!

I immediately got on the phone and tried to get the matter rectified, but each time I got a dead end. So I called the manager of the training department and left him a message with a plea to get our checkride moved up. The problem is that they don’t have enough examiners to go around, and the one guy (Tom) who could do it and was willing to do it whenever they had an open sim, is the only guy who can’t give us our checkride, since he was the instructor pilot who signed us off. Arrgh!

But I wasn’t going to give up – I knew that another crew from our class, Roger and Eric, were slated to take their ride in the morning. And I knew that one of them was having troubles in the sim still, so I called them hoping we could take their place. No luck, they’re feeling ready to go. Good for them, but this Checkride Vulture had hoped for a different scenario!

As it stands now, there is a small chance that some other crew might forego their scheduled ride in favor or more practice this weekend, leaving a spot for us to get it done. But that’s unlikely due to the fact that someone has to coordinate all of that, and those people only work Monday through Friday.

So, Steve and I’ll hang out, trying to “mind fly” and “chair fly” in order to stave off the rust. I’ll endeavor to mix in a bit of relaxation over the next few days with the massive amounts of studying. The good news about all of this is that it’s another chance to reiterate to my impatient self that things happen the way they do for a reason. Like it or not, and right now I’m very much not liking it. As Dad always reminds me, now is the time to “Smile and breathe, smile and breathe….”

Carlos tells me that any airline pilot's ultimate goal should be to get to her retirement day and have the chief pilot have no idea who she is. Yeah, right.... this is me we're talking about!

Simulator #10 -- The end is near!

6:09 AM - Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005
Simulator #10 -- The end is near!
Steve and I finally pulled it all together tonight and flew well. Well enough to get the instructor, Tom, to sign us off for an immediate checkride. Not that this temperamental little plane is feeling glove-like, but we refused to let it whoop our butts for a change.

We're still making errors here and there, but nothing that will get us into too much trouble. Between the two of us, at any one time we're able to catch and head off an impending problem or get it handled if it does occur.

Tom was really laid back and pleasant to be around. He's super-calm, and really cares that we enjoy this sim training as opposed to just getting through it. It’s unfortunate that tonight wasn’t our checkride, as we agreed we’d both pay large sums of money to have Tom as our checkpilot! He gave us some techniques and pointers about how to tighten up our maneuvers, and instilled a sense of confidence in us that until tonight had been missing.

So, all our paperwork is complete, Tom made the phone call to the lady in scheduling and we’re hoping for a checkride tomorrow. And we’ve all but begged Tom to see if he can be the one to do it. I told him that if he conducted our checkride Steve and I would see to it that he had all the beer he could drink in one day! And you know, he might just make it happen!

Now is the push to get all our systems knowledge up to speed, and review performance and regulations. I think it’s manageable and Steve and I’ll be spending the day together cramming this stuff into our heads.

If all goes we’ll, by this time tomorrow I’ll be an official airline pilot (and Carlos is in town to pin my wings on me). We then have one more flight, referred to as QLOFT, or Qualification Line Oriented Flight Training. It’s to help train us to transition from Simulator World to actual “line flying” based here in ATL. The ATL airport is the busiest in the world again this year, and there’s a lot to know that we don’t even touch upon in the sim.

My jaw pain has thankfully quieted just a tiny bit, allowing me to get some rest before tomorrow. If the checkride doesn’t get scheduled for tomorrow, we’re hoping for the next day. The sooner we get this done and behind us, the better off we’ll be. The stress is taking its toll, and we’re all starting to feel cruddy and run down most of the time. It’ll be interesting to see how we handle the transition from the Vampire Shift back into the daylight….. I wonder if we'll scream in squnty-eyed agony and shrivel up?

Simulator #9 -- Wow, I really might be a real pilot afterall!

4:39 AM - Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005
Simulator #9 -- Wow, I really might be a real pilot afterall!

It’s with a certain amount of relief that I report tonight that I FINALLY flew this plane as if I deserved my commercial pilot certificate. It’s a good thing – I was feeling like I’d never have a warm fuzzy about going into the checkride. But tonight I felt comfortable with nearly everything. Maybe it really is falling into place?

Tonight’s instructor was originally going to be our examiner. Thankfully that didn’t turn out to be the case -- he’s a hard-ass, and we were immediately grateful (after our first hour’s break during the pre-briefing) that we didn’t have to take our checkride with him! (We knew via the rumor mill that he would be “tricky”). We still may end up with him again in a few more days, but with any luck, when they get the ride rescheduled, we’ll have someone else. He was helpful, more so for me than for Steve, and we both learned a lot. But he’s really a stickler for stuff, too. “High standards” might be a polite way to phrase it? I’m willing to take our chances that we’ll get someone less “difficult” in the future…..

Unfortunately, our future isn’t so certain. Steve had his worst flight ever tonight. I’m not sure why, but it really did suck. And the more it sucked, the more I tried to help him out and pick up the slack, but then Karl jumped all over me for not letting him learn. Great, up until now I’m told by one instructor to “act like a crew, help your right-seater!”. So I do, and then I get nailed for “not letting him learn”. So I don’t, and I let him get into all sorts of muck some days. But when it snowballs for him things get bad for us both, so I try to help just a little bit. But then I get zinged again for “bailing him out”. I even got negative comments written on my training forms by the last instructor for NOT helping him out, not acting like another crew member, and for not knowing what the hell was going on! I knew what was happening but had been told to let him make mistakes! I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t! So tonight I tried to pick up as much slack as I could, knowing that it was our last chance to show that we were ready for our checkride, but it wasn’t really helping Steve. His 2 hours as pilot flying went quickly from bad to worse, and having giant ol’ Karl yelling at us from the back wasn’t helpful. The first time I tried to prompt Steve and try to help him get ahead of the plane (he was still sitting, dazed and confused on the runway 20 minutes after we took off!), Karl whacked my arm and told me to “leave him alone and let him hang himself – that’s how he’ll learn!”. Ugh. Everyone has a bad sim – tonight was Steve’s.

Thankfully, Steve was able to pull it together just enough to not get me into too much trouble when I flew for the last 2 hours. He was obviously frustrated and distracted by his really poor performance earlier in the night, but for whatever reason I was right on tonight. (Thank goodness or we’d have become a smoking crater!) I was not only able to fly really well, stay ahead of the plane for a change, and fly the maneuvers and procedures properly, but I was also able to keep an eye on poor Steve over in the left seat. A few times he just blanked out and did something stupid (or started to) but I had eagle eyes. It was really quite astonishing how I flew tonight – like I’d been abducted and replaced by someone who belongs in a CRJ…. Thankfully, because we’ve only got one more shot to pull it all together. I want this damn checkride behind us – the stress is really starting to take it’s toll.

So, tomorrow night’s checkride has now turned into another training session, in which we’ll both pull it together and prove to the next instructor that we deserve to go up for our checkride. Which they’ll hopefully schedule on our day off so we can just charge through and get it the heck done. As the schedule stands now, we’ll knock out the checkride in the next few days, then get the QLOFT out of the way (point A to point B as a “normal” flight in the sim to teach us about ATL operations) and then we’re scheduled to have about 6 days off before our first real flight “on the line” in the airplane. The longer we take getting this checkride done, the less time we’ll have to go home and relax…..

I guess that what everyone’s been saying is true – there comes a day when it just all sort of falls together. It seems like today was that day for me. May tomorrow be that day for Steve (who suggested he’d actually probably be hanging from the rafters by his sheets come morning)…..

3:04 AM - Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005
A Day Off -- And A Mystery Partially Solved
Today was a day off, which always comes with a sense of relief and dread. Relief that I don't have to spend the night in the sim, and dread that I have the entire day to study. I'm really getting sick of this darned Canadair Regional Jet....

Strangely, the ache in my teeth has spread to my entire lower jaw. Yesterday I was conscious about how tense my jaw was and I took an Ambien before falling asleep to relax any tooth-grinding that might happen while I was unaware. But when I woke up, the ache was worse. It’s been getting steadily worse all week. I’ve been visualizing calm, serene scenes before I fall asleep, and have been consciously relaxing my jaw and face muscles for days. Still, it’s worse. Nothing seems to help ease the pain; not Tylenol, not Ibuprofin, not Orajel.

So, tonight I decided that either something really bad is happening and maybe I have dreaded disease, or it really is uncontrolled stress manifestation. And then I was looking closely at my jaw and teeth and gums in the mirror tonight when I discovered a tiny little hole in my gum! It’s like a little bug was there with a jackhammer, drilling away an egg-shaped hole in the bottom of the gum where my lower lip connects to my jaw. I’m pretty sure it’s the source of my distracting pain, but I have no idea what it is or how it got there. It’s not a canker sore, and it isn’t a localized pain. It’s like something nasty got into my jawbone and is drilling away incessantly. And I’m convinced it entered through that weird little hole…. Maybe now that I know the source (if not the cause), those frightening tooth-loss dreams will stop?

The Hole Discovery was about the only meaningful thing that occurred today on my day off. I studied for awhile, of course, but not much. I had decided to get up early and get some exercise and sunlight (indeed I’m becoming pasty and white), but that plan fell through when I slept until after 4pm and took forever to get organized. So then I thought I’d go to a movie, but I didn’t want to deal with rush hour traffic. So I then figured that I’d help pass my long late night by seeing the 11pm movie. But this part of Atlanta is rough and all I need is to get mugged or worse – I’d have fried all these brain cells for nothing. So, here I sit, still in the hotel room, at 0300. With a severely aching jaw. And a bad case of cabin fever….

Sim #8 -- The end isn't really the end

6:08 AM - Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005
Sim #8 -- The end isn't really the end

We’re breathing a sigh of relief now that the “final” sim session is behind us (and we haven’t hung ourselves yet). We decided last night that we both wanted more practice before our checkride, and tonight was a lot less pressure-filled knowing that we’d have another stab at these maneuvers to get them before we sat down with the FAA. Thankfully having extra sim time is not a huge deal here, and about 1/2 the guys going through sim training now are scheduled for extra sessions. It's still hard on my ego, but I'm rapidly learning that professional jet flight training isn't at all about ego. Ego and complete mental, intellectual, physical and sensory overload don’t mesh.

I wish it had been a lot more successful than it was, but at least we made improvement. Tonight we practiced the maneuvers in which we're needing more time at the controls -- V1 cuts, go arounds and single-engine go arounds are the biggies. Unfortunately visual approaches are really tough for new hires in this plane for some reason, and we're no exception. Partially because the visuals in the sim aren't exactly realistic, and partly because we're just not used to the sight picture. The visual approaches are actually kicking my ass. Hard. The CRJ has about a 3-degree nose down attitude on final and it's such a strange picture from the Citation, which has a far less pronounced nose down pitch angle. So when I level off at the minimum descent altitude on a hand-flown non-precision approach, hit the planned descent point and head down, even though I see my VSI in my inside scan, I'm still troubled by the outside visual picture and unconsciously tend to decrease that pitch attitude, which causes me to be too high on approach. So, I end up with far more pilot-induced go arounds as a result. Which really pisses me off, especially when we're down to one engine. We are improving from one session to the next, but we're still not there. I think by the time we're done with another 8 hours in the box in each seat (two more full sessions) we'll be ready for the ride. And the good news is that maybe the examiner we've got currently scheduled for our checkride (known as the company hard-ass) will be rescheduled to someone else! We can only hope.

I'm trying not to get discouraged. It's hard not to, when our instructor pilot says things like, "Well, I just can't teach you to land. We'll have to call in the big guns and get someone else for you guys." Jerk. He bitches that I'm not doing it right, but he hasn't been able to tell me exactly what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it. Ugh. It's embarrassing to be at this point in my career and struggling with visual approaches.... C'est la vie, no? Again, it’s ego-killing and frustrating as hell.

So, as it stands we're going to be pushed back 2-3 days for our ride, putting in around the 27th or 29th. Which means we've got 2 more days of study time for systems at least, and 2 more days in the damn hotel. I'm really burning out. At this rate I'll never want to upgrade to captain, never want to transition to another aircraft and will never want to leave ASA....

It's so hard to not get frustrated and to maintain a good attitude. I'm feeling like although I'm making progress, it's not enough and it's not quickly enough. It sucks to feel like a retard, doesn't it? My Citation training kicked my ass, but that was to be expected with only 350 hours total time and never having flown anything more challenging than a Seminole. But I expected FAR better of myself here. I've been in a jet for the last 18 months for goodness sake! SO humbling.... Steve was struggling, and still is in some ways, but he's flying the plane better than I am. I've got the profiles and call outs down better, but he makes the damn plane do what he wants more effectively. Again, humbling....

Thank goodness tomorrow is a day off. I’ll get caught up on the systems studying, get some rest, resume my exercise profile (which got shot all to hell last week) and might even do something relaxing (there are a few fun-sounding geocaches in this area I have my eyes on).

And we’ll get it, eventually. At some point in the next week Steve and I will take and pass our checkride successfully, earning our airline pilot wings. We’re trying hard to focus on that fact right now….

Sim #7 -- Progress - painfully slowly, but surely...

5:50 AM - Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005
Sim #7 -- Progress - painfully slowly, but surely...

It’s a good thing that tonight was an improvement over last night, or I’m not sure I’d still be here. I have fantasized about loading Em into the car, pointing it northward on the freeway, and pretending this nightmare never happened. But no such luck – I need these measly paychecks. And I’m not leaving here until I get to check off my “I’m an Airline Pilot” box, damit!

Steve and I were better rested and slightly more on schedule tonight than we were last night. Not that we were chipper and smiling, but there definitely was less dread going on. We’d met with John at a coffee shop for a few hours before our night officially began so we could review the electrical system on this plane. It’s hard to believe that my brother Tom and I are related, as he’s been studying electrical engineering and I can barely tell you the difference between AC power and DC power. Nor do I care, really. If all indications are in the green and everything is going along just fine, I couldn’t care less that the CRJ-200 has 2 ni-cad batteries and 5 transformer rectifier units. I don’t give a rat’s ass that it requires 22 volts of power in the battery to be able to start the APU. But alas, I am learning to get this stuff into my head so it at least appears that I care when I’m sitting in front of the examiner.

But I digress. We flew better tonight than we did last night, which really isn’t saying much. Last night sucked so badly that we were both on the verge of tears off and on. Tonight I still had to beg myself not to cry, especially when John played “how can we teach stupid Erin to fly a missed approach procedure correctly?” It’s amazing to see the different styles in teaching that our two instructors have. One of them was masterful at managing our learning and our psyches and the other one is like a bull in the china shop that is our minds. Thank goodness we’re nearly done.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us tomorrow night, and Steve and I are both in agreement that we want one extra sim session. We’ve yet to convince our instructor, but if we fly tomorrow like we did today, I’m sure he will agree with us. The problem is that we just need more practice. Now that we mostly know how to do most of the procedures and maneuvers most of the time correctly, we just need repetition. Tomorrow night’s final sim session won’t throw too much new at us, but it will be enough that I don’t think either of us will feel comfortable moving ahead into the ride without more practice. If it keeps me from getting a Dreaded Pink Slip from the FAA, then I’m ready for The Stigma of An Extra Sim Session….

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this all is that I keep having vivid dreams about my teeth falling out. Almost daily do I dream that my teeth are either rotting out, that they were knocked out, or that I just talk and in the process accidentally spit them out. My teeth hurt all the time when I’m awake, and especially when I emerge from the sim and when I first wake up each afternoon. I wake up feeling panicky and distraught that I’ve lost all my teeth (once again), and my teeth and gums hurt so much that I don’t wish to eat. And the less I eat, the less I feel like eating. And then I don’t have the energy to exercise, so my study schedule gets all out of whack. And then my brain powers down and I fly like a third grader, so then I get more stressed out and sleep less peacefully, inducing more dreams of rotting teeth. It’s weird….

Simulator #6 -- The 4-Hour Ass Whooping

5:31 AM - Friday, Oct. 21, 2005
Simulator #6 -- The 4-Hour Ass Whooping

Now that 24 hours have passed and I’ve calmed down (I’m actually writing this log on the night of the 21st), I have a bit more objectivity. A bit. Suffice it to say, Sim Session #6 whooped our assess. Almost as badly as Sim #3. Last night I had to remind myself, kind of like a silent mantra, “breathe deeply and don’t cry, breathe deeply and don’t cry – there is no crying in flying, there is no crying in flying”. It sucked that bad.

I’m not really sure why it sucked so badly, actually. It was like we’d regressed and things we once knew we didn’t last night. I was exhausted to start, as I’d gone home for my day off and got my schedule messed up. When I got back to the hotel around 2pm I took a nap for about 4 hours to try to assuage the damage from my schedule deviation, but it didn’t really help. And while I was home I felt like I was coming down with something. Sore throat, swollen glands, headache and upset tummy. That lasted for a few days, and culminated last night. I was supposed to fly last, but Steve agreed that I looked like crap and let me fly first. It didn’t help. I still sucked on nearly every maneuver, even things I’d consistently done correctly before this session. That was so frustrating – to not only have a new instructor (we were very happy with Keith, thank you very much) but to then fly like a moron. Great. At the end of the session I got all low marks again, and John, our new instructor, suggested that many of Keith’s previous positive marks and comments in my file were erroneous. Yeah, that helps low self-esteem and high self-doubt….

It’s hard to put that stuff behind me. I’ve never been a big fan of criticism, and it’s hard to just breathe the comments in, let them swirl around in my mind like a robust wine, and then allow them sink in without making them mean anything. Though I am getting less and less quick to berate my mistakes, and I’m getting more and more able to shrug off some of my mistakes. But to have an entire sim session feel like a freaking waste of time really hacked me.

Thoughts of dying in the night and winning the lottery ran through my feeble mind until I finally fell asleep. Either would be preferable to this humiliating, degrading, brow-beating crap. The days are starting to suck, and we’re all feeling it. I ran into another crew from our class and they were, thankfully, feeling the same way. None of us feel like we deserve our pilot’s certificates, and none of us want to be here anymore. This sure is a lot of bullshit to put up with for crappy hours, a less than desirable schedule, and pay only slightly above that which would allow us to qualify for food stamps. It stopped being fun a few weeks ago, and now it feels just dreadful. The only thing that keeps us hanging in there is the fact that in just a few more days we’ll be done with training.

Steve and I have our checkride scheduled for the middle of the night on the 25th. But John, our new instructor, decided that we weren’t were Keith had said we were in our progress, suggesting that we might need an extra night in the sim. Which is like a big stigma around here, “Oh, you needed an extra sim? Hmm. Bummer.” It sucks to be branded “slow learners” as we’ve been feeling pretty darn retarded for weeks now. But it does beat busting a checkride. THAT would suck.

So, tonight was a little better, though we both made a lot of errors. It’s not flowing yet. It still feels like we’re barely managing to stay up with the plane for most of our approaches and maneuvers. We do something, and if by some miracle it happens to be within standards, that’s it – we move on to something else. And if it’s not within standards the first time, we do it once or twice more and hope that it is. The typical method of human learning is all but thrown out the windows here. There is no time to practice something until we feel comfortable. We’re expected to “chair fly” in our minds in front of the cockpit poster, but it’s not the same. Not even close.

After a little discussion tonight Steve and I have decided we’d rather live with the Stigma of Having An Extra Sim Session than go forward into our ride feeling this shaky. Neither of us would put ourselves up for a checkride in any other rating in our careers, and this one matters the most. We sure as hell wouldn’t send any students up for their rides if they felt this miserable about the way things were progressing!

The other good news about having another session is that we might not have to have Mr. Fezer, The Meanest and Toughest Examiner of Them All. We learned that we have the hard-ass dude for the checkride if we fly it as scheduled. So we’re all in agreement that if we can toss in another night in the box, get a little more comfortable with the way things need to be, and then tempt the scheduling gods to give us a different examiner, we’d be better off.

Meanwhile, I’m getting to the point that I just don’t care….

Simulator #5 -- It Happened - I got the Red Screen of Death

6:20 AM - Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005
Simulator #5 -- It Happened - I got the Red Screen of Death

Not that I’m going to get cocky or think that the sim and I are super-buddies or anything, but tonight went very well again. I am getting a better handle on how things run, though I still make dumb mistakes from brain overload from time to time (like forget to descend to the runway while in the solid clouds only to see the runway pass beneath us on the GPS map!). My missed approaches were better tonight, my V1 cut was better and my instrument letdown to a visual circle-to-land was even good. It’s a captain thing, but we have to have a clue about how to handle the situation, so since Steve and I are both F/O’s in training, one of us has to fly the captain-only maneuvers. Tonight I got the circle-to-land at JFK and he got the no-flap landing. We both did them well, especially considering that they’re captain-only maneuvers.

The place I got a bit behind the aircraft was on my first non-precision approach into New York’s JFK. There wasn’t anything particularly difficult about the approach, but I just got a brain-clog. I forgot to descend right away from one altitude to the next step-down, and then I had to get configured for landing more quickly than usual and got wrapped around the axle about a call-out or two. We got it handled, but I was flustered and Steve was busy covering for my mistakes that we both didn’t realize that it was time to start down from 1500 feet to the minimum descent altitude, and flew right on past it. And you know, it’s hard to land from that altitude!

So we regrouped, and then I got a windshear on my next take off. Actually, I got a failed engine and a windshear at the same time, which… uhhhh, though I hate to admit it and my ego is still a bit bruised, caused me to get The Red Screen Of Death. It happened so quickly that at first I was in disbelief that we’d actually crashed – I was sure it was a simulator malfunction! (Oh good, an excellent trait for an airline pilot – denial!) I kept the plane on the centerline of the runway on take off, and when the engine failed we started to drift a bit, but not too badly. I got airborne, got the max power set for the single-engine climb out, and then we got the windshear warning. I started to yaw the plane a bit (wiggle from side to side) struggling with the single engine rudder inputs in the shear, and then to compensate I used too much aileron (which banks the plane left to right). I didn’t think the roll was too bad, but then The Dreaded Screen appeared. “Crap!” (though that’s not exactly what I said) In addition to learning a lesson (that windshear on take off immediately after the loss of an engine is bad), I only killed a maximum of 53 people. I look at it this way – I could be the First Officer in one of those new Airbus 380’s, which would allow me to potentially annihilate an entire town with one dumb move! It’s good that I’m only in the CRJ - minimizes the damage….

On a serious note, we were sad to say goodbye to Keith, our sim instructor. He’s been excellent and the 3 of us have a good rapport. It’s amazing to us that we’re his first crew as a new sim instructor! He admitted that little fact after we were done with the de-brief at 0430 this morning, and we could hardly believe it. If he was this good now, the crews who get him a few months and years down the line will be superbly trained. We can only hope that John, our next instructor, will be as competent and will key into our temperaments and personalities like Keith did. Keith was great at teaching to our different levels and to finding a way to get each of us to the breaking point each night, to hover us there, and then slowly allow us to get the situation back under control. He was very, very good and he really knows that airplane. I so look forward to the day that the CRJ fits me like a glove the way it fits him….

More good news – we have tomorrow off, so I plan to catch a jumpseat out of here (when I wake up this afternoon) to spend a night in my own bed in Richmond! Of course I’ll take copious amounts of books as we’re in the final week’s countdown until the checkride on the 26th. But Jeanne’s proven herself as an excellent study buddy and I have made a few hundred flash cards so a non-pilot can help me study the systems specifics and limitations. While she’s at work all day, I’ll sleep so as to keep my vampire schedule, and then we’ll study all evening before she hits the sack, and I’ll stay with the books until the wee hours of the morning. It won’t quite be normal, but it’ll sure be nice to get home and be with my sweetie, visit my cat-son and sleep in my own soft, non-hotel bed and eat something other than dehydrated food particles! Ah, the little things, eh?

Simulator #4 -- Windshear, Missed Approaches and V1 Cuts

5:45 AM - Monday, Oct. 17, 2005
Simulator #4 -- Windshear, Missed Approaches and V1 Cuts

I think… well, it’s hard to imagine…. but, uh, I think I’m finally starting to punch back! I most definitely still have a black eye, but I’m starting to defend myself a little better and actually to fight back!

Actually, on second thought, here’s how I’m going to look at it from now on. I’m not in the boxing ring with the sim. It’s more like I’m on the back of a highly sensitive, overly spooky dressage horse. She’s flighty, she’s touchy and she’s still better trained than I am. But I’m getting there, and rather than being adversaries we’re starting to become friends. Okay, maybe we’re more on a “what was your name again?” basis, but we’re getting there! And, as with any new acquaintance, it takes a bit of time to get to know each other, to smile at the good things and to breathe when the not-so-good things appear from time to time.

So tonight I got reared up on and had to deal with a few bucks once in awhile, but I didn’t get flung off this time. Whew! After last night’s “ride” I was getting worried, but I’m now suspicious that it’s going to turn out a-okay in another 10 days….

Poor Steve, bless his heart, managed to fly us right into the ground on approach to the runway when we got hammered with a wicked windshear. Yes, we got the Dreaded Red Screen Of Death. We were told the shear was going to happen, but we’d never actually had to deal with it in this plane yet. Sure enough, about 300 feet from the ground we lost massive amounts of airspeed, and sank quite deliberately right into the field at the near end of the runway. And with our vertical speed I’m sure we didn’t leave much other than a smoking crater…. And, I was helpless to be able to save us, as he had the controls and it was a lesson he needed to learn. I kept calling out that we were sinking and he needed to pitch the nose up, but I’m not sure he heard a word. Thankfully it was just a sim -- though we may have bruises underneath our shoulder harnesses tomorrow!

Then my turn came to fly (I was his “pilot monitoring” to start, and then we switch seats, allowing us to fly from the right seat for 2 hours each). But I’d learned from his mistakes and took matters into my own hands, not waiting for the command bars to guide my flight path. I didn’t get the autopilot kicked off as quickly as I’d have liked, but I did get our nose pointed up and got climbed out of it way before we made grass contact! It wasn’t excellent technique, but it worked! And we’ll have time to tighten it up tomorrow night.

The good news tonight was that I was enough ahead of the temperamental little plane (yeah, it only weighs 53,000 lbs) that I am starting to feel like by the 26th we’ll be riding together like old pros. Well, okay, not THAT comfortably, but we’ll at least know each other well enough to get the job done. And we’ll do it with as much grace as one would expect after a mere 16 hours of time on her back….

I will admit that my most challenging struggle tonight was the “V1 Cuts”. In the Citation they weren’t much of an issue. But this plane is funkier when it looses an engine on take off. It’s not happy. And it tends to careen off the side of the runway, making death imminent. My first cut, though I knew it was coming, was survivable but not pretty (I destroyed all 5 tires). WAY not pretty. People would definitely been puking back there. I nearly departed the runway on the ground, not using enough rudder to counteract the zigging motion from the dead engine. And then when I finally got us airborne I nearly induced a Dutch Roll, which also could be fatal at low altitudes. But I didn’t, somehow. As long as I remember to breathe every few minutes up there, I’m starting to get the feel for how much control input is enough and how much is too much. In the CRJ-200 that line is very, very blurred. At least at this point in my training. Sometimes I realize that I’m so tense that I haven’t moved or breathed or even blinked in minutes! And I wonder why I almost get tossed off with each buck and rear?!

So, one of the beauties of the simulator is that we can be slewed back to any position over and over again to get a maneuver right. I had to do the cut 3 times, each with more rudder input but still not enough, before I got it on the 4th try. The Citation was cake compared to this sucker! But I had my usual small-dog-with-tasty-large-bone attitude and when Keith asked how I was feeling and if I wanted to get it knocked out tonight, my response was something like “Hell yeah, I’m not leaving this chair until the passengers can’t tell that we’ve just lost an engine!” And though my 4th cut wasn’t quite that smooth, it was within parameters and with that we called it a night. If I had had my way, we’d be in there until the sun rose!

But it was definitely a good way to put the sim to bed, with a pat on her back and a “thanks for the lessons” nod. And a deep breath….

Simulator #3 -- Stalls, Missed Approaches, and Single Engine Approach & Landings

5:40 AM - Sunday, Oct. 16, 2005
Simulator #3 -- Stalls, Missed Approaches, and Single Engine Approach & Landings
I can honestly say that I psyched myself out tonight before I even got to the simulator. I woke up with a feeling of dread, that dread lasted the entire day, and by the time 9pm rolled around I was wishing for an arm amputation as opposed to getting in the “box” tonight. Or at the very least, the removal of a few fingers.

The good news is two-fold: I finished the Stall Series (which demonstrates that I can hand fly (no autopilot) the aircraft when the poop hits the fan and we’re on the verge of being out of control. It took me longer to get them (there are 3 – “clean” at altitude, approach to departure and approach to landing), but I got ‘em. I still don’t feel like I did them well, but Keith said they were good enough for him to mark “SAT” (satisfactory) on my evaluation form. Hopefully they’ll come together more smoothly by the checkride in 12 days, though we won’t get to practice them until the last sim session. The other good news of the night is that Steve was abducted and replaced by a CRJ pilot! He flew the heck out of the plane tonight relatively speaking and his confidence has soared. Now, if I could figure out why mine has plummeted….

Actually, I have a pretty good idea about how I got myself psyched out. I came in here having a darn good clue about how tough these months would be, and about how much there is to learn in such a short period of time (though it seems like I’ve been living at the Red Roof Inn my entire adulthood). But I also guessed that I’d do better than average because of my jet background. That I’d be light years ahead of my sim partner, who has spent his professional years as a flight instructor in small trainers. And all through ground school, and all through CPT (sitting in front of a mock cockpit “mind flying”) I was ahead. And even in the first 2 sims comparatively speaking I was WAY more ahead of the plane than Steve. But tonight I walked in there feeling unsure of myself, nervous about knocking out the stalls once and for all, and dreading the whole evening. Not a situation ripe for learning…. I set the bar too high for myself, thinking that because I can fly a Citation competently I should also be able to a CRJ without much trouble. But I realize now that’s akin to expecting the Space Shuttle pilots to go from flying all the high tech fighter jets to completing a mission in the the Orbiter without all that training. Just because I’m a good pilot doesn’t mean that I can hold myself to the standards to which I’ve been holding myself. Not only is it unrealistic, but it’s now messing with my mind. Which is something I can’t do with one iota less of right now!

So, my instructor reiterated tonight that I was doing fine. I’m still ahead of the (gasp) “average” new hire and I’m still definitely on track for an on time checkride on the 26th. He even wrote in my daily evaluation form that I did a “good to excellent” job tonight. “So”, I ask myself, “why are you having a hard time letting the compliments in? Why are you making your self-esteem worse than shaky when you’re DOING FINE?, DAMIT!” Because I expect better than fine? Because I know I’m not “average” and I almost never accept an average performance from myself? Because I have clung to the fact that I had a bit of a head-start in my class of flight instructor guys and I’m doing everything I can to retain that lead? A lead that I’m SO not used to having in the aviation aspect of my life! I was the one who struggled the most at PanAm, or so it seemed. And indeed I felt confident coming here to ASA, but I think I’m on the verge of eroding that confidence dangerously low if I keep up this pressure. Now is the time to nip it in the bud, accept that I’m doing the best I can and that somehow it’ll all gel in the last 5 sim sessions. Now is the time to, as Bob Jex would always say, “press the ‘I believe’ button”. I realize I’m not doing myself any favors by keeping this pressure on myself. It was humbling to see Steve fly so well tonight – and good for him! Good for him for trusting that it would happen. Now’s my turn to believe. Competition is good, to a point. I’m learning that….slowly.

On a good note, I’m very proud of my eating, sleeping and exercise habits while on this weird schedule. I’ve been eating very healthy (and ravenously – you’d think I was a maggot!) and have been getting at least 8 hours of sleep a day. Sometimes not all at once, but my 1-2 hour naps before hitting the sim are making a lot of difference in my mental clarity. For some reason I’m still dropping weight (loss of all those carbs?) but I suppose that’s to be expected with all the mental activity burning up my cells. I’m also running in the middle of the night on the hotel’s treadmill for 35-45 minutes. By next week my goal is to be on that sucker for an hour each day. It’s a good time to bond with my flashcards, and it is creating a great sense of balance, trying to keep from sliding off the end of the treadmill while holding and reading hundreds of little color coded cards! And then in the evenings, after I’ve awakened and eaten a healthy breakfast at 4pm, I take the flash cards outside for the requisite amount of sunshine, walking around the airport for 30-60 minutes. I’ve never had this much rigor with my schedule, though it’s not quite one I wish to keep once training comes to an end!

The days and nights seem to fly by in some respect, and at other moments it seems like it’s never going to end. But the reality of it is that in just over a week I’ll get to check one more thing off my To Accomplish In This Lifetime List – airline pilot.

Simulator #2 -- Precision and Non-Presision Approaches, Stalls, Steep Turns

6:29 AM - Thursday, Oct. 13, 2005
Simulator #2 -- Precision and Non-Presision Approaches, Stalls, Steep Turns
Okay, this is how I’m choosing to see it. The sim, big mean box that it is, is a lot like a big, mean prize fighter. We’re in its home ring, in its hometown, and it’s winning. Big time. We’re not only black and blue, but Steve and I are bleeding. Puddles.

But we’re not the types to give up. We wouldn’t be here if we were prone to walking away when the going got tough. So, we’ll train and train and train and train. And then, on or before October 26th, we’ll deliver one cruel blow. The sim will fall at our feet, and we will have silver wings pinned on our shirts in celebration.

Until that happens, it’s all Steve and I can do to A) not cry, B) not wish we weren’t alive, C) not question our status as pilots, and D) not wonder what the hell we were thinking.

The problems are not new to me at all. Unfortunately I thought it would be different this time. Steve and I have been studying hard, practicing everything we need to know. But we’ve not been taxing our brains enough while we study. It’s not enough to know all the checklists and flows and emergency action items and flight profiles solid, cold and down pat. Sitting there, in the quiet of our hotel rooms or the peace of the paper cockpit mock-up, it’s all well and good to have them memorized and to be able to spit them out on command. But when we power up that sim, fly it around in weather, deal with Air Traffic Control, manage lights and bells and whistles, and rectify emergencies, we can’t seem to remember our own names! That happened last night, and it happened again tonight. We definitely improved on certain aspects of the flight, but we still have a long way to go.

So, to nip it in the bud we’re going to have to study and practice over and over with only part of our brains engaged in the “flying”, and the other part will have to learn to deal with the rest of the environment. Enter The Tennis Ball. From now on when we learn flight profiles and cement the checklist flows, we’ll be doing it while tossing a ball back and forth to each other.

And in 2.5 weeks that sim will wish it had never met us….

Cockpit Procedures Training Session in the Simulator

5:57 AM - Saturday, Oct. 08, 2005
Cockpit Procedures Training Session in the Simulator

It’s coming up on 0600 and I’m unable to wind down. Tonight’s sim session went pretty darn well, considering that it was only our second time in “the box”. Our instructor, Keith, is very complementary and reminds us frequently (especially when things get bumpy and we’re hard on ourselves) that we’re still ahead of the curve and doing better than average. Which is good, since I don’t ever expect average from myself! (Dang it’s hard to be a beginner sometimes!)

In the last few weeks I’ve thought to myself how interesting it’s been to notice that my self-assessments and my self-confidence are in a very, very different place than they were last time I went though intensive flight training. When I was in Orlando getting my Citation type rating I was so far behind the curve and everything was completely foreign to me that I never felt comfortable with anything I learned those 15 days. And for the first few months of my new job at Dominion in the actual jet I felt like a fraud. But this training has so far been a very different experience. Part of my hesitation with deciding to apply to airlines was that I didn’t think I could really hack it in such a structured environment. Not that flying private jets isn’t structured, but it’s a different culture than the airline. And I’d heard plenty of stories about airline training and how rigorous it is, how they don’t tolerate even one word wrong in the verbatim repeating of emergency memory items, and how if you screw up more than once in training you’re gone. I didn’t really think that my free-flowing, barrier-averse temperament would do well in an environment like that.

But what I’m noticing is that my 18 months in the business jet has really given me a solid foundation upon which I am building my CRJ airline pilot skills. Not only am I learning a lot more than I anticipated because my study habits were formed a few years back, but I’m also enjoying myself and this process. Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t enjoy dragging my buns out of bed early 6 mornings a week for the last month-plus to sit in a classroom all day and listen to rules and regulations being blabbed at us. And I didn’t enjoy the stress of having to take exams on massive amounts of material I’d barely digested each night. But I did have a solid enough background to let me have a perspective on the whole situation, to see the big picture. And my good scores on the written exams were confidence-builders!

Now that I’m in the sim I’m fortunate to be able to breathe much easier than I did the first time around a couple of years back. I can see the forest for the trees! That ability has made these last 6 weeks much more enjoyable than odious. And now that I’m on the vampire sim session, which is more in tune with my own body clock than the early mornings were, I’m noticing how much is really getting in my head. My synapses are actually growing closer together at a quickened pace! (And there are no doubt billions more now than there ever were; it’s amazing I can even hold my head upright).

Tonight on a break between flights (we each fly for 2 hours in the right seat as pilot flying, then switch to the left and act as pilot monitoring) Steve expressed concern to me that he’s dragging me down, holding me back. Granted, he’s much less experienced, not used to thinking the speed of a jet and is used to doing everything and monitoring the entire situation all the time as a former flight instructor. That kept him alive to see another day! He has had no 2-pilot experience until now. But here in this sophisticated jet it’s complete sensory overload and it’s all he can do in some moments to keep the thing upright. I, on the other hand, have the luxury of about 600 hours of jet time under my belt, which makes this much easier for me to pick up. I’m able to notice more things at once, and able to fly well and do other tasks. Not that I’m doing stellar by any means, but I do fret less and make fewer mistakes. Just because of the experience I’ve had in the past. So I told Steve not to worry at all, that rather than hindering my learning he’s actually enhancing it – his lack of experience has me keeping a sharper eye on him, which divides my brain between flying and monitoring and is making me a better pilot. I have the luxury of being able to do a good job flying and also helping him with his tasks from time to time. But in perhaps more importantly right now it’s serving to boost my confidence in myself as a pilot, as a beginner and as a future captain.

Two months ago there was no way I could even envision myself as a captain of an airliner. But all that’s beginning to change. I’m doing well enough with this training to believe that when my seniority number will hold an upgrade to the left seat that I’ll be ready. And I’ll make a damn fine captain someday!

Simulator #1 -- Welcome to What Feels Like The Space Shuttle....

5:18 AM - Thursday, Oct. 06, 2005
Simulator #1 -- Welcome to What Feels Like The Space Shuttle....
All of the studying and cramming, test taking and memorizing has culminated in our ability to finally get into the simulator. We had a 3-hour pre-briefing from 9pm to midnight and then got a feel for the plane (identical to the sim) from midnight to 0400. We finished up with a 30-minute debrief of the things we did well individually and as a crew, and the things we need to work on before tomorrow.

If you’ve never been around a full-motion Level D simulator, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like. Rumor has it the CRJ sims cost upwards of $20 million each. Should I win the megaball lottery it’s one of the first things I’ll buy! It’s about 2.5 stories tall and looks like a big bulbous pod on top of 8 hydraulic legs. Remember those giant “walking” robot-like things in the early “Star Wars” movies? The sims at Flight Safety (training company) are similar. They’re bolted to the concrete and have such accurate movements that both the students and the instructors must wear 5-point harnesses. When I was learning to fly the Citation, my first jet, I actually crashed so hard that my 60-some year old instructor fell out of his chair! They simulate such real flight that the FAA doesn’t care that our first flight in the actual physical airplane is one with 50 passengers in back! There is very little that can happen in the real world that the instructor can’t make happen in the sim. Icing, turbulence, windshear, icy runways, gusty cross-winds, single and multiple systems failures, lost communications, computer glitches, you name it.

The idea in the sims here at ASA is to train hard and test easier. As I said, every possible failure can be programmed into the sim, and a crash (not that I’d know!) actually hurts! Some crews mess up and get the “red screen of death”, but so far Steve and I have been spared that sight. But rather than let us get a feel for the plane and how it flies in our first night in “the box”, we were given system failure after system failure right after take off. Keith, our instructor, did allow us to keep both of our engines, but that’s the last flight for which that’ll be the case!

We got through the failures well, and are learning to do the proper things with the switches at the right times. It’s one thing to sit in the still and quiet of my hotel room, staring at a paper mock-up of the flight deck, and “push” the correct buttons in the correct order for each phase of flight. And it’s quite another to do it when there are noises and buzzers, lights and whistles going off. And to try to maintain control of the plane, while talking to air traffic control and trying to stay on course or fly an approach into an airport in bad weather. I can almost feel the new pathways being seared across my gray matter -- it’s definitely sensory overload!

Our instructor said we did very well tonight – well enough to get some extra time to fly around without the autopilot on. We practiced some straight and level flight, turns, climbs, descents, and experimenting with pitch and power, and how it feels when 30 degrees of flaps go out as opposed to 45. Or what happens with the lift when the spoilers are deployed. Just like every other airplane ever built it flies the same way aerodynamically. If you point the nose too high you’ll slow down and eventually stall the airflow over the wings (and in the case of the CRJ you’ll die). If you point the nose down too far, you’ll speed up beyond the limitations of the structure and potentially rip off your wings. But the CRJ was built by those kind Canadians in order to be flown by a crew of trained idiots, really. It’s such an automated, dummy-proof airplane that with enough training and practice anyone could learn to fly it. Not that it’s easy at all, but it’s logic makes sense and it handles well. It’s so automated and so redundant that it’s a pleasure to fly and it’s easy to learn to trust.

Thankfully Steve and I have the benefit of my previous jet experience, and my previous type rating training in the Citation. I learned how to study effectively and we’ve spent a lot of hours together on the ground learning this stuff. It’s hard to believe that we’ll only have 8 sim sessions before our checkride (which is in 3 weeks!), but they have a 90-some percent pass rate. Amazing, really. Mind-boggling.

It’s still a bit hard to adjust to the vampire hours. We’ve been so used to getting up at the crack of dawn for the last 6 weeks that it’s tough to sleep enough during the day to be awake until the sun nearly rises again! But the room has dark curtains and Em the cat is thrilled to spend as much time curled up with her momma, no matter what time of the day it is! And Ambien is a beautiful thing….

So, each night we will continue to have the kitchen sink thrown at us, over and over, making us faster and more accurate. The learning is manageable in content (barely), but we worry about the amount of stuff that’s got to get into our brains and stay there. It’s the staying there that’s the tricky part lately! It’s like the more stuff that goes in, the more stuff that falls out. I swear I wake up with entire paragraphs and colorful schematics lying on my pillow….

Welcome to my ASA training experience!

6:05 PM - Friday, Sept. 30, 2005
Welcome to my ASA training experience!
Week Five
ASA New Hire Training
September 30, 2005

Thanks to another new hire First Officer at a sister regional airline and her post on the Professional 99s (women pilots) listserve, I learned about this cute little way to let you all in on my airline training experience. It's free and easy and if you're interested check out www.diaryland.com.

Since 5 weeks of new hire training at Atlantic Southeast Airlines have already passed, I'm starting this journal a bit late. But most of the other stuff was boring to read about and a lot of you already heard about the rare exciting parts over the phone or in emails. The rest of it is just filler that took up about 93% of each of my days... ;)

So today we completed all most all of our classroom training. The first two weeks were Basic Indoc -- company procedures, rules, regulations. What's expected. What's forbidden. Essentially how to look and act like a pilot at ASA. The next two weeks were packed full of buttons and levers, gears and switches, lights and bells. And hydraulics and generators, TRUs and BTMSs, EICAS and CRTs, doors and wheels…. If it’s a part of the CRJ-200, chances are I know about it. I know where it is, what it does, what else it’s connected to, which way it moves, what it lights up, what disconnects it and how to stow it. In theory. There are 85 knobs/buttons/switches on the overhead panel alone. The center console is about 3 times larger than the overhead! Thankfully most of the information we look at in flight appears on 6 giant cathode ray tube screens. Kind of like TV!
The Flight Control Panel (autopilot) and adjacent Bad Things Warning Lights Panel have 33 things to push. Crazy!

Soon we’ll have to find a way to integrate all flows with all the checklists with all the buttons with all the profiles. Should be interesting….

Week two of ground school

7:12 PM - Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2005
Week two of ground school
Week Two
ASA New Hire Ground School
September 5-10, 2005

Finally, the two long weeks of “Basic Indoc” are behind us, quite successfully. Our exam was yesterday (Saturday) morning at 0800, and I was thrilled to score a 98%. I was worried about it due to my lack of studying, but more about that later.

Basic Indoc at ASA included all the Standard Operating Procedures (SP’s), which was a HUGE binder full of company policies and procedures. Then they handed us another huge binder called the Flight Operations Manual (FOM/Ops Specs). That’s got all the in-flight policies and procedures. And then we have the Airplane Systems Manual, which is even larger. And all the manuals we got for CRM (Crew Resource Management). And the Union – ASA contract, which is a little book in and of itself. And then 3 binders of Jeppesen approach plates and en route charts for all the airports we fly into and all the possible alternatives. That’s a lot of plates as we currently serve nearly the entire US, some of Canada, some of Mexico, the Bahamas, and Turks & Caicos. Not only are there a lot of newly dead trees in my possession, but most of them have to be carried with me for every flight! Crazy!

So my two weeks of Basic Indoc were mostly interesting and manageable. Our 2 primary instructors were a kick. Walt is a retired Air Force pilot and current ASA captain on the same aircraft I’ve been assigned (the CRJ-200, 50-passenger regional jet). He really cares about our education here and he’s passionate about almost everything he taught us. Except weather. Poor guy – it nearly killed him to go through the weather presentation. It’s a review of all the stuff we were taught earlier in our careers, about fronts and fog, turbulence, windshear, the Coriolis force, weather patterns throughout the world, etc. He’d tried to get another instructor to come in that day, but no such luck. So he stalled for as long as he possibly could, and then started the slides. And there he stood, at the front of the room, staring at the first slide, which broke down the layers of the atmosphere into its 4 main sections. And then about 30 seconds of silence. After which he started to talk about the U-2 and how it flies above the first few layers. Which then led (thankfully!) to more war stories and other non-weather diversions. Eventually some smart-ass in the class suggested he just click through the presentation much more rapidly and put us all out of our misery! So we adjourned for lunch and somehow never managed to finish that weather presentation!

Dale, our other instructor, was retired military as well, and he’s quite jaded and cynical. He recently turned 60 and was forced to retire by that stupid FAA regulation mandating that our most experienced pilots stop flying. Both guys are very macho and right-winged, and they’re both Federal Flight Deck Officers (pilots authorized to carry loaded weapons while flying). We talked a lot about that program, and I have changed my mind from thinking it’s insane to have loaded guns in the cockpit to believing that it’s a good idea. After hearing them speak about their 9 days of training I’m convinced that in the right hands loaded guns could perchance prevent another September 11th-like attack. As soon as I have the opportunity (a week off and a spare $300) I’m planning to fly out to New Mexico and fund my own training to become an FFDO as well.

Our 2 days of CRM class were very interesting. Our instructors were two young captains who are very interested in the study of human factors and error mitigation in aviation. The concept of the latest generation is that as long as there are humans flying airliners, there will be mistakes made on the flight deck. (The safest flight is the one that never leaves the ground!) But the good news is that with all the technology flying has never been safer. And most airlines the world over are teaching their pilots about the common causes of accidents (fatigue, loss of situational awareness, etc.) and how to best avoid them. We watched a lot of videos and re-enactments of large airline disasters. Then we discussed them in detail, applying the main CRM concepts we’d learned earlier in class. The class was dynamic and interesting, and I learned quite about how to reduce the possibility for error when I fly.

So the reason that I was worried I’d not pass my end-of-course exam was because my good buddy Carlos invited me to occupy the jumpseat of a flight up to Islip/Long Island the night before the test. They were scheduled to leave before I would be out of class, so I didn’t bother studying hard the night before that instead. I figured I’d not make the flight and would have all of Friday night to prepare for the test. And then their flight was delayed, which had me racing over to the terminal directly from class, and trying to hop aboard before they closed the door. After some paperwork errors and a few phone calls from gate agents and the captain, we got authorization (I haven’t been in the system quite long enough to have been “electronically verifiable” yet). Captain Russ is a great, great guy and he told me not to worry as they’d not leave without me. Somehow they’d find a way to get me in that jumpseat. And despite the best efforts of the gate agent to ensure they didn’t -- they did!

We took off from Atlanta for a 2-hour flight up to NY. The guys showed me tons of stuff and we all had a really good time. I’ve visualized that day, sitting in Carlos’s jumpseat at ASA, pretty much since I started flying. He was almost as excited as I was! Russ has been with ASA for about 15 years, and has been the captain of nearly every aircraft in the fleet. He’s a fun, kind and patient guy, and a very good instructor. Among other things that shall remain unmentioned (to protect the guilty), they let me work the radios for much of the flight. Since I’d been flying jets with Dominion I’d heard the “Candler” call sign of ASA flights and used to answer them back in my mind. So the first time I acknowledged an altitude change as “Candler 178” I smiled big as both guys clapped. I’m becoming a real airline pilot! My last thought as I left the aircraft back home in ATL was that at no point in the flight did I feel overwhelmed or not understand what was happening or about to happen next. My 18 months flying the Citations in the Northeast Corridor have given me a very solid foundation and I’m sure that the coming months’ training will be a bit less traumatic than I’d originally anticipated. But on the shuttle bus back to the hotel at midnight the night before the exam it occurred to me that I’d had a distinct lapse in judgment. I’d chosen to ride the jumpseat rather than put in those much-needed hours with the books. It might have been my first flight with ASA, and if I didn’t pass that test it would also be my last!

Needless to say, it was a long night and an early morning on the day of the exam! But thankfully it all worked out and I passed it with flying colors. Now if only the next 2 weeks’ systems modules go as smoothly….

On the "home" front, little Em-the-cat is doing well. She still wakes me up most mornings between 0430 and 0530, but I've just taken to shoving her off the bed, which seems to shut her up. Eventually she decides to crawl back under the covers and go to sleep, but not before I lie there awake until it's time to get up! To help stave off her boredom I've been "suiting her up" in her little pink harness and leash and taking her outside in the hotel’s grass for an hour or so while I study. She loves to lay in the sunshine and watch the world go by. Unfortunately she's getting fatter by the day -- that's what happens when we don't get enough exercise (I speak from experience on this one!).

Yesterday after the exam we were given our sim partner pairings and simulator schedules. My partner is a nice fellow by the name of Steve, who's a year older than I am. He hails from the Boston area and speaks like Matt Damon. He's been flight instructing for the last few years and has no large aircraft experience. But he's got a good work ethic and isn't afraid of long nights and long days. Which is good, since the two of us were assigned the "Vampire Sim Schedule". We report to the Flight Safety sim bay for 3 hours of pre-flight briefing at 9pm. And then we crawl into the full-motion simulator at midnight for a total of 4 hours. And then we have a post flight briefing from 0400 to 0500. Just in time for breakfast! Thankfully my previous life as a bat will serve me well. And Steve's not too worried about it either. Should be fun at the very least -- I wonder if my skin will become pasty and white after a few weeks of that?!

Thank you to those who’ve sent cards and care packages. I’ve now got plenty of good, healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks here in the room. At least for a few more weeks. That’s allowed me to concentrate on studying rather than foraging out in the Real World for food. I appreciate the well-wishes and words of encouragement. I am having a great time here, and though I miss Jeanne and Junior a lot, I’m also very happy to be one of the newest members of ASA’s pilot ranks. Seniority Number 1748 out of a total of 1759 – yikes! It’s a great company and we’re all hopeful that with the SkyWest buyout we’ll be in much better hands with a brighter future than we had with Delta. They seem like a really classy company. We still have a contract to fly with Big D through 2020, and hopefully they’ll get a bunch more pilots behind us so I can get off reserve and start holding a decent schedule. But first things first, no?

Hello from new-hire training!

6:10 PM - Saturday, Aug. 31, 2005
Hello from new-hire training!
ASA Ground School
Atlanta, GA
Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Well, the fire hose has been turned on here at new-hire training for ASA in Atlanta! It's only Day Three of Basic Indoc and already I'm falling behind in the studying. My eyes are wide and I'm gulping with the rest of the class, and so far feel like I'm still at the top. :) It's pretty ego-boosting (yeah, like pilots need more of that!) to be the only girl in the class of 16 and to be one of the few with mostly right answers. :) So far. Though I realize that could all very well change as things progress.

Em and I are settled in here in room #423 at the:
Red Roof Inn, Atlanta Airport North
1200 Virginia Ave.
Atlanta, GA 30344
(I keep getting asked for the physical address, so here it is. And care packages are greatly appreciated!) :)

It took the cat a few nights to chill out, but she's feeling at home in her 4th-story room with a view of the parking lot. The first room we had was less than desirable, so after a bit of negotiating with the front desk (can we say cranky?), Em and I moved to a much better room. Further from the elevator and away from the yapping little dog. "Uncle Carlos", my good buddy from ASA, was here yesterday and over-night, so Em had company while I was in class all day. It's very boring for her to spend 24 hrs in the same little room for a few months at a time, but she's a trooper. Minus the 0500 frantic purring, howling and mommy's-face-licking episodes we're doing well in our cell! Each day she seems more and more at ease and doesn't seem to miss her little brother, Junior, who got left home with Momma J. and the dog.

Class is enjoyable, in a masochistic kind of way. Our main Basic Indoc instructor, a funny captain by the name of Walt, has a great sense of humor and really knows his stuff. He's been here for over 15 years and has flown everything in the fleet. It’s a pleasure to have such able tutelage, but each day brings me thoughts of both confirmation and doubt about my longevity as an airline-pilot-wanna-be. I'll feel comfortable and knowledgeable about some particular thing, and I'll think to myself, "Sweet, I can do this. I'm actually going to be flying a jet for an airline in a few months!" And then a few hours will pass and I'll get all wrapped around the axle about something, and doubt will creep in, "Ugh, how have I even made it THIS far without someone seeing right through me?!" It is heartening for me to see that some of these guys are so young, with such little "meaningful, real-world" flight experience and they’re trying so hard! I am SO grateful that I didn’t come from flight instructing to ASA, but that I had the extreme good fortune of hanging out in a jet in the Northeast for the last 18 months. It’s made all the difference.

The good news is that I am senior enough in my class to have been awarded my aircraft and base of choice: the CRJ-200 50-passenger regional jet and I’ll be based here in Atlanta. Salt Lake City is our other domicile but I’d much rather be hot and muggy than cold and “minority”! Of the 16 in my class I am old enough to be #5. Seniority at ASA is all based on date of hire, and for those of us in the same class with the same hire date, it’s done by birth date. The oldest in our class is a 41-year old retiring Army Blackhawk helicopter instructor pilot. And then there’s a 35-year old retired Navy P-3 pilot. Two more just a bit older than I am, and a class full of young ‘uns! I suspected I’d be in the top third seniority-wise, which was good because I’d hate to think I’d have to fly the ATR-72, a gangly high-winged 66-passenger turboprop. Thankfully we only had 2 pilots from our class have to join the ranks of the “prop trash”! ?

So, life at the Red Roof Inn isn’t so bad. It’s a lot of studying, a lot of trying to pay attention for 8-10 hours of dense and sometimes obtuse lecturing each day, but in the end it’ll be a good thing. Atlantic Southeast Airlines is a class-act, they respect and treat their pilots well, and they understand that it’s about 5 months worth of information we learn in a matter of 10 weeks. They’re here to ensure that we make it through the program, and keep reminding us that attitude is 80% of it. If we show up prepared, with good attitudes, even if we have trouble in systems training or in the sim, they’ll make it work.

Amazingly I’m closer and closer to becoming an official airline pilot with each passing day. Today we got our company ID badges. This Friday, after our cabin fire training (whoohoo – crash axes and portable breathing hoods!) we’ll get our Airport SIDA badges that will let us jumpseat all over the world. If I had the time it would be fun to hop a Boeing 777 jumpseat home to SEA for a day! Soon, I’m sure….

It’ll be nice to have Jeanne join me here in ATL for the weekend. In between digesting manuals we’ve got an appointment with a realtor to look at homes in a nice little town about ½ hour south of the airport. She’ll likely have an hour-long commute into downtown, but it’ll be a nice compromise to live in a decent neighborhood in a well-built house. Mostly I’m eager to have a bit of a diversion spending time with my sweetie! I hope she’s able to find a good job here (if you know of anyone looking for a great fraud investigator, lemme know!) and get moved sooner rather than later. It’s hard to be a partial family, each of us with only one cat….

For now, I appreciate the emails and care packages that have already arrived. I’ve not done any of this aviation career alone, and your support and encouragement mean an awful lot to me. I’ll keep you updated as I have the time.

Meanwhile, thanks for the thoughts, care packages, phone calls, emails and good vibes. And for those of you with loved ones in the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama area, godspeed.