It ended up being a joke, and took only about 10 minutes. The guy before me took 2 hours. He said it was pretty tough when he got out. The examiner is a self-proclaimed redneck with cowboy boots. Generally a jolly fellow who appears to have been giving check rides for quite some time. When he met us that morning, he asked if we knew how to spell success. “S-U-C-C-E-S-S,” my classmate said. “Nope. Not even close. S-C-O-T-C-H.” I started by filling out a weight and balance form from a dispatch release. I realized I’d messed up when I went…
I’ve not been at all worried about this exam up until about, oh, two hours ago. I’m prepared; I don’t know why I’m worried. Maybe something to do with the thousands of pages of material, all of which is fair game, and which I cannot possibly hope to contain in my feeble little brain. Good pilots deal well with stress. Do I deal well with stress? I don’t know. I’d like to think I do, but the truth is, I don’t think I generally recognize stress, until I’ve been affected for some time. I realized I must be stressed when…
Yesterday, while doing door pulls, I reflected that it really doesn’t seem like it was that long ago I was inside a CRJ in Atlanta operating the emergency exits for flight attendant training. It was pretty much exactly the same drill in Phoenix yesterday except this time I had to show the instructor how to get the door back in because he couldn’t figure it out! I’ve got two days left of “systems” class, though we pretty much finished reviewing the systems last week. Our test is Friday. I fully expect many of the questions/answers on the test to be…
The terrorists have won. They wanted to disrupt our lives, and they’ve succeeded. They did so by helping creating an organization so mind-numbingly stupefying it’s brought the greatest nation on earth to its knees. I refer, of course, to the TSA. First we couldn’t take our fingernail clippers onto planes with us, in case we tried to clip the pilots’ nails. Then all of a sudden it was okay again. Then some would-be terrorists in Britain heard, probably on a movie, that if you mix some chemicals together, you can create an explosive. They performed a trial run using inert…
[Note: This entry back-dated.] Since I got my crew badge, I can theoretically ride in the cockpit of airliners. I got up early yesterday morning and had Jonah drive me to the airport. The weather folks said there was a 100% chance of snow the night before, and it did snow, but not much. I’d been worried that the flight I wanted to get on would be delayed, and at the very least, need de-icing. Turns out the ceiling was 600 feet with 3 miles visibility, which was plenty good enough to take off. Even good enough to land. The…