I've been off the boards since Sunday...just got home from my annual recurrent training on the 727 in SDF.
It went pretty well. As usual, I got a lot out of it and feel humbled walking away but I SWEAR that sim doesn't fly like the real plane. You sure don't want to say that to the instructor, though, or tell him how things are out on the line...sometimes I talk too much.
The one day ground school is a total blow off...hard to stay awake. Then two days of hell in the sim. Very first sim was my leg and we had smoke in the cockpit...which means you have to put on your oxygen mask and shop goggles... yeah, I think the goggles they give us are like the ones in shop class. Anyhow, you have to talk to each other via the intercom and can't see anything very well. The F/E who was reading the checklist actually said "My glasses are fogged up and I can't read the checklist"...not what you want to hear when you're on fire.
I did a GPS approach but didn't push it over fast enough at the VDP and was a bit high. Got it on the runway but past the touchdown zone...should have gone around but, luckily, the instructor didn't make me do it over. It's really hard making a non-precision approach because we can't start down until the VDP and then can't exceed 1000fpm, either. I think I could do better if we actually did them once in a while rather than once a year in the sim...
They told us we won't be legal to do ADF approaches anymore...only GPS overlays. I said "yeah"
The good news was I did about the best V1 cut, that's an engine failure on takeoff, of my life during the warmup sim. I think the instructor overlooked my kinda sloppy one on the checkride the next day cause I had a great one the day before. Also, my warm up ILS/engine out was sweet. One checkride day I flew a great ILS/engine out but made the mistake of looking too much at the runway at minimums rather than mostly staying on the gages at first. I made some ugly gyrations to get it on but it was all within limits...the instructor said "nice save".
We got to do some fun stuff towards the end of the last sim. The instructor tried to vector us too low for an approach but I happened to have a chart out that had a published DME arc at 3800 in the area where he was trying to get us down to 2500. I told the captain to refuse the clearance and the sim instructor had to tell us to go low to demonstrate the EGPWS capability...good catch on our part. We got the PULL UP call and a cool display comes on that shows the terrain you're about to hit.
I just bid the 757 out of the Ontario base...not sure if I'll get it this time but will sooner or later. I've been on the 727 for 13 years but it's slowly on the way out at UPS and there are only two schedules left I'm willing to bid anymore and they could go away any time. On the 757 I can fly out of my home town a lot or do Honolulu layovers some. I just don't like the fact I'll have to go to Louisville for two months for training.
Sorry for the long post but I guess you guys like hearing about this stuff...