Training

It's that time again. Every six months I have to have a couple hours of oral examination and 4 hours in the simulator. They recently extended our training so it's now two days. The first day is in Fresno, CA. It consists of a couple hours of instruction/questioning and a couple hours in a flight training device. The second day is in Long Beach, CA with the oral and simulator.

Wednesday was a long day. I had to be at the airport in Boise at 5:30 to catch a flight to Salt Lake connecting to Fresno. My sim partner is a guy named Brett Wilson who is LDS that lives in Salt Lake. We found out that my sister knows his brother. I guess his brother is a rad tech too at St. Als where Myca works. Small world. Art Emery was our instructor for day one. I really enjoy Art. He's done a number of training events for me. I caught a 8pm flight to LAX and didn't get home until 11pm. Brutal.

Brett and I realized while we were in Fresno that we had both done a proficiency check at our last simulator so we both qualified to do a LOFT. We called and had the paper work changed so that we could do a LOFT. A LOFT is line oriented flight training. It doesn't require us to do an oral exam. In essence we fly two legs just like we were out doing it for real. LOFT's don't take as long and they are non jeopardy. We flew from Fresno to LAX then LAX to Orange County. They basically just want to see how we communicate, our situational awareness, how we handle the problems in a real flight environment, and decision making. We had just a minor problem on the first leg of the flight and then a engine failure on the second leg. We evaluate our own performance at the end and the instructor gives feed back as well. Our instructor was Tyler Allen who did my upgrade training. He is the perfect type of guy to be in the training department. He is relaxed but thorough and makes you feel like he knows you are competent.

Simulator training is always stressful. There is just so much on the line. This was as positive of a training experience as it can be.

The one funny thing that happened was this Irish sim instructor who is based in Portland walked into the room that we were briefing in. He kind of did a double take when he saw me and said "you look like that actress." I said which one. He said that he didn't know her name but that she was on the movie that he watched the night before. Then he couldn't remember the name of the movie. So he said she was in a lot of Adam Sandler movies. He remembered the name of the movie was Funny People. Then my instructor said she was also in Knocked Up. I haven't seen either of these movies people! I had no idea who they were talking about. My instructor said "Don't worry it's a compliment."

After sim was over it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I feel like when sim is approaching that I need to spend time preparing and studying for it. This is why I have gotten so behind on my blogging. I actually just get behind on everything. My house is a mess. So now I can relax...or at least get some stuff done!