Paper Tiger

Learning procedures at zero miles per hour

Three and a half weeks and counting of waiting for ground school now. I didn’t realize that starting life as an airline pilot would be this easy on the front end, haha! The airline industry is currently in unprecedented times, and the pilot shortage that was being felt in 2019 is back with a vengeance. It’s creating some problems for the regional airlines, though, because it’s not just a lack of pilots, but the fact that they’re losing check airmen and captains faster than they can upgrade and train new ones in, as the major airlines snap them up. Unfortunately, for the regionals, hiring new first officers like me doesn’t immediately solve the pilot shortage problem, because they need check airmen to train us in, and captains to pair us with.

Walking at Windsor Great Park - the castle is in the distance

So for the meantime, there’s a bit of a bottleneck, and I get what essentially amounts to paid vacation time. I know, some things just aren’t fair are they! I was able to take advantage of the time off and start using my non-revenue travel benefits and visit my family in the UK. That was a first-time experience—flying standby, and doing it internationally as well. I started to get the basic hang of it though, and managed to pick routes that had enough open seats on the planes. The 5 flights all went off without a hitch and I was able to keep from getting stuck anywhere, so that was a nice relief. I know my turn’s coming someday though; it’s just the nature of non-rev travel. I’ve stepped into a different world.

Saying Hi to the Queen's swans on the Thames

Now as I wait for another likely 3-5 weeks, there’s plenty to keep me busy. The ground school chief gave us some ideas on ways to get ahead prior to returning, and I’ve gotten started on that: reading through the SOPM (Standard Operating Procedures Manual), memorizing procedure flows and tasks for the CRJ-200 from start-up to shut-down, memorizing the aircraft limitations, memorizing the boxed sections of the emergency procedures checklists—I think you get the point there’s a lot of memorizing to do. So I’m actually quite thankful for this extended break. And if I get bored studying those areas, there’s always the stuff from Indoc that needs reviewing and re-memorizing, plus the perusal of the myriad manuals on the company-issued Electronic Flight Bag (essentially an iPad with pilot manuals and apps on it). In a lot of ways, pilots are essentially information managers.

I’m really thankful for my previous flight school job because I feel like it helped me know what to expect. The school was airline-oriented, and all the manuals, SOPs, checklist usage philosophy, and callouts are taken straight out of the airline environment. Even the training pattern is modeled, and so now I’m back to the now-familiar first step of learning how to fly a particular plane: sitting in front of a cockpit poster and pointing at different switches and knobs while going through a memorized flow. They call it the paper tiger; later on, at ground school we’ll get to work with procedures training devices that have touchscreens that simulate the cockpit. After mastering the procedures with these simplified methods it will be time for the simulator training. All in all, about a 2-month intensive training period to look forward to. And after that…the real thing.