Captain development

[Fixtur]

The only way to be sure is to let these FOs "act" as captains for some trips, like a poor-man's IOE. Let them fly from the left, do the planning, deal with the issues, with the "Captain" shadowing them, letting mistakes be made occasionally but otherwise keeping the operation safe.

It quickly shakes out who has "it" and who doesn't, and the tell is in the millions of little things - attention to detail on a WB, thinking ahead about fuel/runway/weather more than just the next leg.

How do they treat the airplane? Like it's a 25 year old Kubota backhoe, or the very complex, delicate and expensive piece of equipment it is?

I hire captains every year, and we sometimes get lucky hiring some dude "off the street", but I feel much more comfortable hiring from a pool of pilots I've flown with before, because I've got to observe all the little things over some trips.

Fix

 

[Karnage]

Very curious to know who the facilitator was!

I'm terrible at these things. I'm too mouthy and tend to sigh loudly when my coworkers say dumb things because my attention span is at a fourth grade level and I tend to get bored easily.

Mine was quite literally in the first or second month they were doing them, when it was still just a one day thing. I don’t think the facilitators had a good grasp on how much and how varied the experience levels of first time captains truly were and treated everyone as if they were slacker FOs who never led anything before. Didn’t help that most of our facilitators weren’t captains themselves or that the few who were had zero or very little real world CA time in the last decade. That was the biggest complaint in the after class survey, essentially why are people who aren’t even pilots trying to relate experiences to me they themselves have no experience in. Sure not all of them had to be, but one or two people who’ve been in HQ for so long they don’t fit into their old pilot uniforms aren’t helpful either.

But I also described the class as something that 40% of the class already knew how to do better than the facilitators, 40% weren’t gonna listen and felt being there was punishment or some conspiracy to deny them a green slip, and 20% actually could use the info and benefit from the class. I’m hoping it’s changed a lot since then, but again, I won’t be recurring in class for a while as you know.