After two week “vacation”
preparing our house to be sold and an enjoyable week of driving cross-country,
I arrived in Houston on Sunday night to begin pilot ground school on
Monday. After spending an enjoyable
weekend with my brother and his wife in San Antonio, I moved into the Hampton
Inn here in Houston and met my roommate, Steve. Steve is a great guy - I’m glad he is my roommate.
This company is top-notch. The training here makes Ameriflight’s seem
like a joke, quite honestly. The
training facility is located at Houston Intercontinental Airport. It’s only a year old and handles everything
including new hire pilots, pilots upgrading to captain or transitioning to
different aircraft, and even flight attendants and customer service agents.
Training is organized like
this. Basic indoctrination was five
days of general stuff like company policies and material about how things work
here at Continental Express. We had
several guest speakers, including our union reps, and also ordered our
uniforms. We followed that this weekend
by a two-day course on cockpit resource management, which taught us skills to
use in two-pilot crew. Having a captain
aboard to answer to will definitely be new to me!
My training class has 30
people, ranging in flight hours from 700 to 3100, and ages from 21 to 43. My flight hours and age are above the
median. 18 of us are in the regional jet,
and the other 12 are in the Brasilia, which is a 30-seat turboprop made by the
same company that makes the jet, Embraer.
We also received our base
assignments on Thursday. I got
Cleveland, which was our first choice.
Most people preferenced Houston, and not one person got it, except for
the Brasilia people because all Brasilias are located in Houston. So I guess the big debate of Cleveland vs.
Houston was moot. Thank God I didn’t
end up in Newark.
Next week I will begin
systems training in the jet for two weeks, learning about how this thing
actually works. My preliminary studying
indicates this airplane is one giant computer with wings. Should be right up my alley. After that, we do what is called cockpit
procedures training, or CPT, for one week.
Then I will take an oral exam.
After that the fun will really begin with simulator training! The EMB-145 simulator is way cool. It’s two stories high, and moves on these
enormous hydraulic struts so when you are flying it, you actually feel like you
are flying an airplane. I’ll have eight
sessions in the sim, then I’ll take a checkride. Once I pass the checkride, I’ll officially be a first officer and
will finally start getting PAID!
After the checkride I will
do aircraft training, which will be only two nights. Most everything is learned in the simulator. These two long training flights (3-4 hours
each) are done in the middle of the night since our jets are under heavy
utilization and have to carry passengers and produce revenue during the
day. Following aircraft training, I
will climb into the right seat and fly actual routes, with passengers aboard,
for about 25 hours. This is called
Initial Operating Experience (IOE) and is done with a specially trained captain
who is there to teach the ropes to new hires.
And that’s it! Then I begin
reserve duty in Cleveland.
I am expecting a significant
break between simulator training and aircraft training because of a backlog of
pilots needing to be trained. The cool
thing about that is that it’s basically a paid vacation, and during that time
I’ll head back home to Oregon and wait things out there. That should occur sometime in
August-September.
Training is not easy. We’re in class for 9 hours and generally
have about 2-4 hours of studying to do at night. I haven’t worked this hard since high school!
Also, an interesting thing
happened this week on Monday.
Continental Airlines announce that it is spinning off COEX. Apparently, there will be a partial IPO in
late September, and the company should be entirely its own entity within a
year. The reasons Continental is doing
these are financial and I won’t go into them here. I’m not sure yet if this is a good or a bad thing. The airline, which will be called ExpressJet
Airlines (or XJET), will still operate entirely as a feeder for Continental
under a codesharing agreement for the next several years, so I don’t think
there will be many changes for me. Even
the airplanes will still be painted the same.
Still, what a weird thing to happen on the first day of class. I can’t control it, so I’m not really going
to worry about it. And if this had all
happened six months ago, I would have still gone to work at the same place.
I’m very happy to be
here. I miss my wife and my cat and
Oregon, but overall, things are going pretty darn well so far. It’s nice being able to focus on one single
goal. I have suspended doing any
consulting work since I don’t have time and I don’t need the distraction.
More next weekend. I’m going to try to fly home for the weekend
to see Stephanie and attend my 10-year high school reunion. It will be my first break after 12 straight
days of class. Hopefully there will be
space on the flight. My round trip
ticket will cost me $20 or might even be free.
Gotta love working for the airlines!