Friday I got my new SIC rating certificate. Saturday I finished LOFT. LOFT is Line Oriented Flight Training. Basically it takes you from the training environment and puts you in the line environment. It’s supposed to be a normal flight in real time. This morning we flew from ATL to DCA. Short flight. The Captain [...]

My check ride was at 4PM. I had a 3PM show time to do the briefing. Around 11AM I found out updates for my manuals came out last week and were effective yesterday. Thus I needed to update them. While on the line I get emails about updates. While in training I am at the [...]

Simulators are the most unreliable jets in the world. Engines will catch fire, gear will fail to extend, you will go around, thrust reversers will pop out in flight, flight instruments will fail and new Captains will swing the tiller way too fast. My instructor gave us these words to live by last night : [...]

Same instructor. Different session. Simulator’s are incredibly complex machines. They mimic every part of the airplane. Much like airplanes…simulators can have issues. Started in LGA. Winter operations. Snowing. On pushback I started the number one engine and then shutdown the APU which is standard ops…for summer. Because it was shutdown we would have to do [...]

Rough night in the sim. Different instructor. I went first. Departed from KPSP (Palm Springs) on 13R with the Cathedral 9 departure. Very busy departure with turns and climbing to avoid terrain. We briefed it using conventional (no FMS) navigation and how busy it is. On takeoff I was able to use the FMS but [...]

Day 3 was somewhat easy. Precision approach day….errr night. When I arrived the sim was down. It had been down all day. The previous crews were now a day behind. We did our briefing hoping it would be fixed. Literally 3 minutes for our sim session it was fixed. Nice. APU fire at the gate. [...]