BobDDuck
Island Bus Driver
I don't want to move this into a low time pilot debate, although that is most certainly the root cause here.
Here's what I saw while jumpseating (on a company aircraft) today.
FO was doing IOE. He was assigned to this check airman yesterday at at the start of the trip had already had 60 hours of OE. During sim he had taken 12 sessions to pass (instead of the normal 7 and then a checkride) and after 45 hours of IOE had been sent BACK to the sim on his own dime to get procedures down.
During the flight he had trouble keep the plane near the centerline during the take off roll and then had problems pitching up during the rotation (even with the FD up). The climb out was pretty basic with runway heading until we were given direct a fix on our route out of 2000 feet. The climb was erratic in pitch and his turn on course was very shallow and when told to tighten it up by the captain he ended up overbanking the aircraft. Once established on the new heading he blew through his attitude by 300 feet (again, with the FD) and recovered by throwing on the autopilot while still in the climb. Stuff was ok then although he had trouble syncing the engines and spent most of the (relatively short flight) trying to keep the power about even and within 40 knots of our cruise speed of 290. Once we got a runway assignment it took him about 5 minutes to go through a visual approach brief and in the mean time almost oversped the aircraft while descending. He went through 10,000 with out slowing (did even catch it when the captain called out "10" a few times) and once he did put the power back to slow he forgot to put it up once we leveled off and we slowed to about 200 before he realized it. The approach was on the autopilot and our speed varied about 20 knots in each direction of what ever the current target was. He configured about 10 miles out to be "ready" although when he did dump the autopilot at 400 feet he WAY over controlled and and was about 2 dots wrong in both directions. He eventually got it down and the landing was soft but about 4000 feet down the runway (which was 10K so we were ok).
The scary thing is he had NO idea that stuff wasn't going well.
Again, this isn't a commentary on low time pilots (although he is) but rather just me wondering when the training department is just going to cut their losses. Remember... this wasn't a training flight. There were 50 paying passengers in the back.
Here's what I saw while jumpseating (on a company aircraft) today.
FO was doing IOE. He was assigned to this check airman yesterday at at the start of the trip had already had 60 hours of OE. During sim he had taken 12 sessions to pass (instead of the normal 7 and then a checkride) and after 45 hours of IOE had been sent BACK to the sim on his own dime to get procedures down.
During the flight he had trouble keep the plane near the centerline during the take off roll and then had problems pitching up during the rotation (even with the FD up). The climb out was pretty basic with runway heading until we were given direct a fix on our route out of 2000 feet. The climb was erratic in pitch and his turn on course was very shallow and when told to tighten it up by the captain he ended up overbanking the aircraft. Once established on the new heading he blew through his attitude by 300 feet (again, with the FD) and recovered by throwing on the autopilot while still in the climb. Stuff was ok then although he had trouble syncing the engines and spent most of the (relatively short flight) trying to keep the power about even and within 40 knots of our cruise speed of 290. Once we got a runway assignment it took him about 5 minutes to go through a visual approach brief and in the mean time almost oversped the aircraft while descending. He went through 10,000 with out slowing (did even catch it when the captain called out "10" a few times) and once he did put the power back to slow he forgot to put it up once we leveled off and we slowed to about 200 before he realized it. The approach was on the autopilot and our speed varied about 20 knots in each direction of what ever the current target was. He configured about 10 miles out to be "ready" although when he did dump the autopilot at 400 feet he WAY over controlled and and was about 2 dots wrong in both directions. He eventually got it down and the landing was soft but about 4000 feet down the runway (which was 10K so we were ok).
The scary thing is he had NO idea that stuff wasn't going well.
Again, this isn't a commentary on low time pilots (although he is) but rather just me wondering when the training department is just going to cut their losses. Remember... this wasn't a training flight. There were 50 paying passengers in the back.
