I rode the mesa shuttle half an hour to the new training center down at Williams Gateway Airport where the new training center is this morning. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the initial conversation with the training department went something like this…

“What are you guys here for?”

“Uhm. We were hoping you could tell us.”

It seems that we’re going to go through initial training again, but this time it’s a bit different. It’ll be Freedom Airlines training, specifically on the CRJ-900. This is good, because the CRJ-900 is a little simpler than the 200, which which is what we were going to do our checkride in.

This is a brand-new thing, something they’ve never done before. Previously, Freedom CRJ folks have gone through Mesa training, then some sort of differences training. Unfortunately it’s going to be the same instructor we had last time. Not that he’s a bad guy, just that it would have been nice to have a fresh perspective.

Today, they didn’t have much for us to do. They gave us another drug test, then has us full out all kinds of paperwork we’d already filled out. It turns out they’re running another background check on us. I can’t wait until they have the same disastrous difficulty with the National Driver Register, and I have to get my driving record from two states again.

Then they sent us home. Sort of. The shuttle took about an hour to show up to take us back, but it’s not like we had much of anything else to do in Phoenix.

It looks like I’ll be here 5 weeks. 3 weeks of ground school, then cockpit systems integration, an oral exam, and simulator training. And then I’ll go fly in New York. Woohoo.