Next Stop

I was trying to be incognito about the airline for which I'm flying. Unfortunately, I recently moved to a MacBook and don't have any sort of photo editing software, so was unable to remove the company logo from the simulator in the picture. Technically, with two mainline carriers (now one) and 9 airlines in the family of Express carriers, I'm able to preserve some sort of anonymity. So we press on...

I'll try to summarize all that has happened in the last month as best as possible. The last test of ground school was on QPT (qualifications procedures training) and it was a doozy. This was the first test that was not multiple choice. As it was on procedures, it didn't make any sense to be multiple choice, so I'm not complaining. I'm sure it's hard to come up with a written test on what should be practical test material. I did pass on the first try, but not by much, and there was a good-sized group that did not pass on the first try (all of whom passed on the second try). The last afternoon was a strange affair. The lady in charge of sim scheduling gave us our tentative schedules, which had completely changed since that morning. I went from having a sim partner to being in the "holding pen". I won't go into details, but my original partner is not with this airline anymore. A couple people were paired with upgrading captains so they started right away, but the majority of us ended up with some paid time off.

I've used much of my time off to work on the kitchen renovation at the new house. I'm on target to finish it before I have to return to training, which is now scheduled for the 24th of this month. My wife's annual work trip was to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, this year, so I thought I'd use the opportunity to exercise my free travel benefits. In short: that is way too far to travel as a non-revenue standby passenger in these days of reduced capacity. My daughter and I just barely made each of the three flights it took us to get to PVR, and the only way we could get home was by sampling the ZED arrangement we have with Widget airlines. Basically, a ZED is a reduced fare ticket for airline employees to use to travel on other airlines. I bought a ZED for our daughter, and I hopped a ride in the flight attendant jumpseat, which allowed us to fly on the same plane as my wife. The downside, doing so brought us to Widget's major hub in the southeast, and my airline has very few flights into and out of this hub. In fact, Widget has done a great job of keeping almost everyone out, which is amazing considering it's the busiest airport in the world. So, we got to spend the night in said city and used ZED again to get home the next day. All in all, it's probably not something I'll be doing again anytime soon.

I've exchanged emails with the first person in our class to complete sim training. He has been on SOE (supervised operating experience) for two days and is loving it. It makes me want to get in the real airplane even more, but first things first, I have to pass sim training. So now I have two weeks to brush up on callouts and immediate action items (I hope my wife is up for playing flight crew later tonight...no, she won't be wearing a flight attendant uniform, sheesh...). An immediate action item is something that is performed in response to a system failure, but must be done so from memory prior to consulting the checklist. For example, if you experience an engine fire in flight, you don't want to go fishing for the checklist to figure out that you have to shut the fuel off. You just need to shut the fuel off, which is, in fact, the first thing you do once you've identified the fact that an engine is on fire. There are immediate action items for a number of failures, so as you'd imagine it's pretty important to have these things down cold, which is what I'm off to do now. More later!