The truth about being a pilot

Cherokee_Cruiser said:
As for the sim checks every 6 months, I'm all for that! .
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Oh, crap! We only go every 9 months. I guess I'm dangerous now.

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poser765 said:
I can strongly respect this view. It has a couple of major issues, however.

First, the industry, being as standardized as it is doesn't have a lot of ways for people to demonstrate competency. Training events seem to fill that roll. Because of that there is a pretty heavy emphasize on having, as you said, "zero failures of any kind." because of that it's perceived as a strong metric for future employability. That makes pilots view them as a career hurdle and potential pitfall.

Second, just a few bad apples in the school house can seriously destroy any training credibility they have. Someone with a chip on their shoulder can easily ruin prospects of future advancement or even cost someone their job. Admittedly these guys seem to be rare, they are still out there.

Instead of being an opportunity to go work on the things we rarely see, they become "oh crap, I have to prepare for 6 month."
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I guess that also depends on the employer. I hear the horror stories much more so at the regional level than I do at the major level. If I had to guess and again it's ONLY a guess, is that at the regional level you're gonna have guys that shouldn't be in training/checking situations but are gunning for the positions to polish up their resume better and for them it's just a means to an end. Whereas at the legacy/major level they are not looking to add resume bonus points and are doing it from the bottom of their heart because they have a passion in it and take interest. Again, I'm not saying you don't have passionate good guys at the regional level. Just offering a potential reason for why you tend to have more d***s in training/checking events at the regional versus major. At my regional I saw two guys like that in training. IMO if you're only doing it for the resume, you shouldn't be in that position.

Glass cockpit sims are easy non-events. We have to have some kind of standards. Colgan 3407 already showed the consequence of ignoring someone with a continuous repetitive history of failures. I think it should be a metric for employability. We've done away with technical written exams and sim evals in airline interviews. There should be some metric that can show how you've performed/done in your career overall so far. The weak ones should be weeded out.

The regionals are so desperate they'll take anyone.

At our airline we had a very nice guy who passed training, IOE, and was on the line for a couple months. It was his first airline and it was pretty bad. He was all over the place. He scared quite a few CAs and eventually got pulled offline and sent back to the training house. I know for a fact he was given 2 full months of sims (eg, 5 sim days on, 4-5 days off). Even after 2 full months of sims and the training trying to work with him, he just couldn't hack it. So he was asked to resign or face worse, and he resigned. He's at GoJets now....
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
n.

Glass cockpit sims are easy non-events. We have to have some kind of standards. Colgan 3407 already showed the consequence of ignoring someone with a continuous repetitive history of failures. I think it should be a metric for employability. We've done away with technical written exams and sim evals in airline interviews. There should be some metric that can show how you've performed/done in your career overall so far. The weak ones should be weeded out.
.
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I disagree that the Colgan accident had anything to do with checkride failures. The Colgan accident had more to do with long duty times, fatigue, bad weather, and the pilots failure to pay attention and maintain a sterile cockpit.
 
Mavmb said:
I disagree that the Colgan accident had anything to do with checkride failures. The Colgan accident had more to do with long duty times, fatigue, bad weather, and the pilots failure to pay attention and maintain a sterile cockpit.
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How about failure to recognize what was actually wrong with the aircraft, failure to properly follow procedure, failure to maintain the aircraft in a flying state.
 
Mavmb said:
I disagree that the Colgan accident had anything to do with checkride failures. The Colgan accident had more to do with long duty times, fatigue, bad weather, and the pilots failure to pay attention and maintain a sterile cockpit.
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But those checkride failures (and esp once at Colgan) showed a repetitive history of mishandling aircraft and bad judgement calls.
 
Mavmb said:
I disagree that the Colgan accident had anything to do with checkride failures. The Colgan accident had more to do with long duty times, fatigue, bad weather, and the pilots failure to pay attention and maintain a sterile cockpit.
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Cherokee_Cruiser said:
But those checkride failures (and esp once at Colgan) showed a repetitive history of mishandling aircraft and bad judgement calls.
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All the above are secondary and tertiary contributing factors. None of the above are causal actions or inactions that directly affected the aircraft itself.

Cptnchia said:
How about failure to recognize what was actually wrong with the aircraft, failure to properly follow procedure, failure to maintain the aircraft in a flying state.
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Yes. These are actions and inactions, the stalling of the aircraft due to inappropriate reaction to the stick shaker and inappropriate recovery procedures by the crew, that physically caused a perfectly good airplane to be put into the ground. What you wrote here are primary causal factors. The previous items either contributed to these primary causal factors in some way, or were factors unrelated to the specific flight itself but discovered or uncovered during the investigation and classified as a potential hazard, violation, or inappropriate practice.
 
MikeD said:
You realize you just got yourself placed on the Tier 1 hitlist at the command center in ATL.....


:)
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lol yeah, got a friend at delta, I make fun of her hat she shows me her paycheck we laugh and laugh and I cry a little on the inside!
 
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