I’ve got all 100 pieces of information memorized. I’ve taken the test every night this week, and scored 100% the last three times. I don’t think I could be better prepared. If I miss one, I just might shoot myself.

The more difficult test will be the 60 question multiple choice test next friday. I plan to spend most of Saturday studying. We’ve got a couple hours of class and emergency door pulls (where we go out to an airplane and open all the emergency exits) on Sunday. Even on that test, I only need an 80% to pass, which can’t be too hard. Of course, my goal is to ace it. Studying enough to get an 80% and studying enough to get 100% are two entirely different levels of studying. The latter requires some insanity, I think. But, I’m going to have to pass a long oral examination just before sim training starts, so the better prepared I am now, the better I’ll do for that.

I haven’t even started on learning the Emergency Procedures checklist, but it doesn’t look like that’s at all required until our oral exam. So Joanna will be helping me with that one:) Having someone to quiz you makes these things easier.

A local ALPA (Air Line Pilots Association, ie, our union) rep met with us this evening. An hour long presentation with a question and answer session in one of the banquet rooms in the hotel, with a nice steak/salmon/pork dinner. I went for the steak, which wasn’t burned, but wasn’t red in the middle either.

Our rep is, of course, a Mesa pilot. He’s an FO currently finishing up captain upgrade training. He confirmed many of my worst suspicions about how bad working for these guys is going to be, and even pointed out ways in which its going to be worse than I could have imagined.

To sort of illustrate how bad it’s gotten: our contract became amendable (it doesn’t really ever expire) in September. The union let management know in June that they wanted to begin negotiations and got no response. The company finally responded, but hasn’t let union negotiator-pilots on their union-required leave to negotiate.

I suspect I won’t be at Mesa when the new contract is finally hammered out.