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….