Professional Pilot Career Journal

October 7, 2006 – Back at the schoolhouse

After flying my final trip as a first officer on August 28, then enjoying a full month of vacation in September, I have returned to the ExpressJet headquarters in Houston to begin my captain upgrade training.

My journey began with driving one of our cars from Las Vegas to Houston last week. It was a nice drive, and ironically almost the exact reverse of the route I took when driving that exact same car home from Houston to Las Vegas after being furloughed in 2001. Five years later, it felt really nice to reverse the drive, and accordingly the direction of my flying career. Since the company does not put Houston-based pilots in a hotel during upgrade training, it was my responsibility to find a place to live for the 30-day training cycle. I found a crashpad just northwest of the airport, but that required having transportation to get to and from training each day. Plus, in the event I’m on reserve or have a difficult schedule during my first few months of being a captain, I will not have to find hotels in Houston at the last minute.

The crashpad is nice, similar to the one I had in Chicago when I was flying for ACA in 2002-03 and a hell of a lot better than the place I stayed when I was based in Newark in 2004. Usually there aren’t more than three people there any given night in the six-bedroom house, and sometimes I am the only one there. It’s weird being in that type of lifestyle again, but it makes coming home to my wife that much better.

Training is very compressed compared with when I went through initial training. Obviously they expect us to already have a great deal of knowledge on the airplane we’ve been flying for 2-3 years and move through the systems curriculum fairly quickly. We have only seven total days in the classroom, four of which I’ve already completed. Then we have a few days in the flight training devices, then finally four sessions in the flight simulators. I will take my checkride or “type ride” on 10/23, just over two weeks from now. Then I will complete a three-day or four-day trip with a check airman to help me get used to the day-to-day operations of being in the left seat. After that, I will officially be a captain with the pay raise and fourth stripe. It should be all completed by the end of this month.

Although training is not a great deal of fun, it has gotten me pretty excited about being a captain. It’s really a whole new job because I have to think about things that I never really had to worry about as an FO. The difficult decisions become mine, rather than just giving my input and letting the other guy figure it out. When everything is going fine, the job is really no big deal. But when the weather goes to shit and the fuel is getting low, that’s when the decisions really start to matter.

Since the whole point of waiting this long to upgrade was to make sure I senior enough to not have to be on reserve once I completed training, I was disappointed to learn that I will most likely be on reserve for the month of November. However, I’m pretty sure that will be the only setback since I should hold a line in December and beyond. We have a high rate of attrition because of our pilots being hired by mainline Continental, so that keeps those of us remaining at ExpressJet moving up the seniority list at a good clip. I can handle a month of reserve – the variety that occurs in that type of flying will probably be good to break me in to my new job anyway. And since I already have a crashpad and my car out there, it makes it easier to deal with. Even with the uncertainty of our reduction in Continental flying next year, I think the attrition will keep me from losing any quality of life as the transition occurs.

The adventure continues. I’m looking very forward to the end of this training cycle and the knowledge that will come with it.