Firehose, Part 2

Glub....glub....glub....

I throw up my hands; I'm waving the white flag; I throw myself on the mercy of the court. I have officially attempted to drink from the firehose, and it is NOT a pleasant experience. Week two was spent on systems, and I must stress that five days is not a whole lot of time to spend on learning the systems of a fairly complicated airplane. In general, the older the aircraft is, the more complex it is. This is true with most things. Think about cell phones, televisions, ovens. As computers have become more prevalent and advanced in the things we use, our workload has decreased. Well, there are not many computers on my airplane. It's true that we run around with most systems in AUTO most of the time, but I wonder if there are little elves or some more primitive life form behind the panels running the show. If one of those little guys trips and falls while running from the right main bus to the left main bus, a LOT of lights come on.

After the short week learning as much as we could about the systems, we were up against the written test on Saturday. I was panicked, for lack of a better term. Even after spending a month or more of home study, and having a fairly good grasp of the overall workings of the systems, I didn't feel too good about a lot of the minutiae. There are a number of caution light combinations that illuminate in response to certain faults, and I didn't know all of the combinations. There are also a lot of numbers, such as oil, fuel, and hydraulic pressures, that can easily be transposed. We have two primary instructors, that I don't believe are line pilots for our airline. This in and of itself doesn't mean anything, but we occasionally had instructors stop in to teach a system that are line pilots, and they seemed to have a flair for making the system simple to understand. I don't know exactly what the correlation was, but having multiple instructors with different teaching styles only complicated things.

In the end, though, it was all for naught, as I somehow managed to get a 98%. (I'm not trying to brag, I'm still not sure how I got that high of a grade, but I'm glad I passed by a wide margin.) With week two at an end, we prepare to launch into procedures training for week three, which will conclude this portion of ground training. During procedures training we will start to learn what actually goes on in the cockpit, with regards to performing checklists and "flows". A flow is sort of way to visually trace a path around the cockpit and configure systems properly for the phase of flight. By performing flows, and then using the checklist to back yourself up, you can more expeditiously proceed from one phase to the next. In the words of one of the instructors at my old flight school "if you had to sit there and use the checklist as a do list you'd never get off the gate..". Now I see what he was talking about. It's hard to believe we're almost at the end, but I can't get complacent, as I'm already proactively panicking about my procedures practical evaluation...

In other news, we still don't know our base assignments yet, which is causing most of us a good deal of anxiety. I think I'm checking our employee intranet 4-5 times each day to see if it's posted yet. I have flown home as a non-revenue passenger, which, I have to say, is very cool. Our parent airline has very good travel benefits. Specifically, as a non-revenue passenger the only travelers that have a higher boarding priority are secret service agents and a couple of other government agencies. I felt a little weird getting called to board before longtime pilots considering I'm not technically an employee yet. In the end, everyone got onboard so it all worked out.