Build Your Wings

It has been a couple of weeks, but this is the follow up to my previous post about the interview process. The approaching weekend will be my last prior to entering the frantic world of airline training, which starts on Monday. The anxiety and adrenaline levels are running high. In a way though, I’ve been at the schoolhouse since March 20th. My airline does what is known as AQP, which stands for Advanced Qualification Program. What this involves is a significant amount of self-study, which, in theory, shortens the actual time spent at ground school somewhat. To ensure you are studying the material, which you receive at the interview if hired, there are three take home test to complete: one on the FOM (Flight Operations Manual, the airline version of the Policy and Procedures manual), one on Systems, and one on Winter Operations. I found the third one curious, as it is as long as the other two, but there is obviously far more material on systems and policy/procedures. You might think “oh, open book tests, easy”, and for the most part you’d be right. There are some tricky questions though, and you need a 90% in order to pass. I’ve heard that people have been sent home the first day for not achieving that number. I feel pretty good about what I have, especially after spending some time with a fellow new hire quizzing each other and talking through some of the systems. My wife keeps telling me I’m over-prepared, although I feel woefully underprepared. You know how sometimes you study something to the point that you start forgetting the material? That’s where I’m at right now. We’ll find out next week.

The first week consists of a day at company HQ to do the standard HR paperwork, which includes getting into the system to take advantage of travel benefits. We are very excited about this. With aircraft loads at record levels, it’s not going to be as easy to travel as “non-rev” passengers as it used to be. Traveling as a non-rev relegates you to standby passenger status, and if you have been to the airport recently you probably noticed that most standby lists are long. At the bottom of the standby list are the non-revs. Despite that, I’m confident that we’ll be able to take advantage once in a while. Our daughter is already plugging for a return trip to Disney.

After the first day, it’s off to the real schoolhouse in North Carolina for three days of FOM, a week or so of systems, and then procedures. After that first couple of weeks, simulator training starts. I hear that the simulator department is backed up, and people are getting mini-vacations in between, but that remains to be seen. If it happens, I won’t complain, as that will allow me to work on the renovations to the new house. Oh yeah, did I mention that we managed to buy a new house in the middle of all this?

More to follow as I progress through training, until then, it’s back to the books.

I have a number of things to write about, so instead of saturating you in one post, I will break them into two back-to-back posts for your reading pleasure. In this one I’ll talk about the interview process, or as I’ve chosen to call it, the “March of the Penguins”. Allow me to explain…

After completing the checkrides for my multi engine and instrument instructor ratings, I had to make a beeline for home to catch a 4pm flight to Charlotte. This in and of itself was silly, as I was only an hour and half drive from Charlotte as it was. As I was sitting in traffic in Chapel Hill, NC, sweating, worrying about getting a number of things printed in time for the interview, and being hungry, I decided that I would instead drive to the interview. This gave me time to grab a bite to eat and find a Kinko’s, and take my time driving to Charlotte. The flip side is that it would be a long and lonely drive home the next day after getting the boot from the interviewer, or so I thought….

4:30 am rolls around early, especially when you are up until midnight unable to sleep. There has long been an unwritten rule that when you attend an airline interview, you wear a black suit with a dark red tie. I swore up and down that I would break tradition, but here I was, wearing my black suit. I had a striped multi-colored tie on, but nonetheless, I looked like…well…a penguin. Since I had my car, I drove to the training center, and sure enough I was first. The recruiter came downstairs to collect the victims, and I was the only one there. I don’t know if that helped, but I met him first. About 5 minutes later I hear noise around the corner, and sure enough, 8 more penguins march around the corner, sporting their finest black suits. Whose funeral was this exactly.

I’ll spare most of the details, as you can find them on any airline interview gouge site. We started with the written, and then were broken up into two groups for the sim and human resources interview. I am still grateful that I was in that first group. I completed the HR, which was a breeze compared to some panel interviews I had in the IT industry. As a rabid flight simmer, the sim ride, given on a PCATD (basically a personal computer with a commercial level flight simulation software package installed), was like being at home. Of course, when I play at home, I’m not a nervous wreck with a sim instructor breathing in my right ear. But I must have passed, because shortly after that, the recruiter collected me and together we walked to his office, where he extended me a class date of May 12th. Of course this is what I’ve always wanted, but I never, never thought it would happen this soon. Three weeks later I’m over the shock of it and the realization of the impending challenge of flight school has fully taken hold. My flight school and students are disappointed and sad to see me go, but I’m going to get my three most active students as far as I can before I go.

Next up, getting ready for airline ground school…

Let me start by saying I’m really, really, really tired. Why? I spent all day Monday and Tuesday training for my CFII and MEI ratings, was up very late each night, had my checkrides on Tuesday (passed!), drove to Charlotte for an interview, and was hired by a regional carrier flying turboprop equipment (I’m new to this game, and am not sure what I should and shouldn’t post on the internet, but for now I’ll be as vague as possible). That’s three pretty full days right there.

I’m still in shock. I’m actually not even sure how I’m awake to write this, but needless to say I’m very excited. My new company has been around for a long time, and is in a good position to be around for longer. I can definitely see myself being with this carrier for quite some time.

Looks like my blog focus will be shifting soon to a look at airline training, which begins with a LOT of self study. I’ll write more in the coming days, right now I’m beat.

Signing off…

As you might have noticed by following this blog, I recently made a complete career switch from Information Technology to aviation. So far, I’m not flying nearly as much as I would like, but I certainly don’t miss my former job, and quite frankly don’t feel like I ever did that job. It’s very strange.

This past Friday night, my wife rented out a restaurant and threw a party to celebrate. Have I mentioned how awesome she is? And she does stuff like this all the time - completely selfless.

After the toast, I gave a very quick encouragement to the crowd to find and pursue their passions, but I came up with some additional thoughts on that theme that I’ll add here.

In my former career, I struggled with a question that I think many, if not most, of us struggle with daily. What is my purpose? How can I leave this world a better place than I found it? Here’s three things that I came up with, that might work for you.

1. Find your passion
We are all passionate about something. It doesn’t have to be career-oriented, such as mine. It could be your family, a sport, playing a musical instrument, your friends, it doesn’t matter. It’s cliche, but what did you want to be when you grew up? We all had something - I wanted to be, you guessed it, a pilot. That could be a good starting place.

2. Pursue your passion diligently
Okay, so maybe we can’t all quit our jobs and become firefighters. If your passion is cars, you probably won’t be able to run off to Europe and trade rubber with Michael Schumacher on the Nurburgring. But you could join a local car club. Get involved in amateur race leagues. I used to work with a guy that drove his Subaru in auto cross events on weekends. Take a photography class, do some traveling, learn to dance. There are ways to pursue your passion without necessarily quitting your day job, although if you can, you’d have my support.

3. Share your passion
This is the most important step. I’m fortunate right now in that, my job is to introduce others to the joy of flying an airplane. If you have a musical talent, join a band or play at church. Teach an art class. Join an actors guild and perform at local venues. Take your kids to the firehouse. What good is the gift of passion if we internalize it? I’m not suggesting that you take your daughter to the driving range and hit golf balls for hours on end to fund your retirement. But if others see you get excited about your passion, it will encourage them to explore and get excited about their own passions.

Get up. Find your passion. Pursue it. And share it with someone else. Heck, maybe we can leave this world just a little better than we found it.

Time counter ==> (346/15…..have I really only flown 10 hours this week….sheesh)

Wow, didn’t realize it’s been almost a month since my last update. That calls for a little catch up.

First and foremost, I completed my last day as an IT professional on the 15th. I spent my last week really trying to do a good job finishing up a project I was working on, so put in some long hours. After a week like that, I really thought it would be strange flip-flopping to a completely different line of work - I was wrong. I went to the airport the next day - Saturday - and it was like I had never written a single line of software code in my life. In fact, after a week, I’m not sure that I could write code. It’s like it didn’t happen. People have told me that means I made the right decision….I guess we’ll see, huh?

My first week, last week, was up and down, literally and figuratively. My lessons were weathered out for almost three full days. I have Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, so after working Saturday and Sunday, and being weathered out on Monday, I had a weekend. The weather was a blessing in disguise, however…

As I was sitting in the FBO on Monday, one of our senior flight instructors comes in on his day off. On his off days, he sometimes flies a Cessna 402 for a small company. It so happens that he was supposed to fly it on this Monday, but a line of weather in the southeast was preventing him from doing so. As he was sitting next to me he asked “do you want to fly to Daytona Beach tomorrow?” Needless to say, I didn’t have to think about it. So at 6:45 the next morning, we taxied out to the runway to head for DAB to pick up 5 passengers that had enjoyed the Daytona 500 a few days before. As we flipped on the fuel pumps for takeoff, the right engine shut off. This should have been a sign. We restarted, flipped on the fuel pumps, and again, the engine shut down. Jim flips open his cell phone and calls the other pilot to ask if he’s ever experienced this phenomenon. Of course, he hadn’t, and as they were talking on the phone, Jim leans the mixture, flips on the fuel pump, and, naturally, the engine keeps running. Now that we had confirmed to the other pilot that we were imagining things, we took the runway and climbed into the lightening morning sky.

3.5 hours later, we touched down in Daytona Beach. Now, any of you that are familiar with the pursuit of aviation careers will know that time spent flying a multi-engine aircraft reigns supreme. So it should come as no surprise that when Jim mentioned finding opportunities to fly this airplane on my off days, and possibly getting trained and insurance approved to fly it single pilot, I was chomping at the bit. Fast forward to the ground at DAB. We loaded up our 5 passengers, and climb slowly into the warm Florida air. With the wind at our backs, we shaved 30 minutes off the return flight. Aside from some attention-getting moderate turbulence on the way back, we landed after 6.5 hours of golden multi time.

Two days later, Jim comes in and apologizes for putting me at risk. Huh? That’s what I said…apparently, the plane went in for maintenance the day following our trip, and a 5-6 inch crack was discovered in the engine block on the top just behind the gearbox, hence the title of this post. As quickly as it began, my flying days in this good ‘ol 402 are over. Hmmm….maybe they’d be interested in a King Air?

The pursuit of the dream continues…

Time counter => 335/15

Not much to see here, just cracked 300 hours during slow flight with a student on Sunday. The hours are starting to build fast now, and will build even faster when I go full time next month. I might even be at 400 by the end of February! Once I get to 500 hopefully I’ll start to get noticed by some regionals, although I have an “ace up my sleeve” that I’ll attempt to cash in on prior to that milestone. Stay tuned…

Saturday we were lucky enough to be invited to hear Carly Fiorina speak at a local recurring event called the Forum. For those that don’t know who she is, she is the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, the first and only woman to ascend to that position for a Fortune 20 company. She is an excellent speaker, and has an incredible presence, which I’m sure was a tremendous asset to her in her position. I won’t recount her entire story, you can read about the roller coaster ride and her controversial exit from HP here.

It is obvious that she is a very cerebral person, and several key points stood out that I’ve been playing over in my mind since that night:

1. Although directed at our business landscape, the theme was undoubtedly “change”.

2. The most successful species isn’t the strongest or the most intelligent, it’s the most adaptable. This was originally a quote from Darwin.

3. By the time everyone agrees that change is necessary, it is probably too late.

4. Those that fail to change, become irrelevant and old before their time.

Heeding these and other notable points presented in her speech, I promptly decided that the time for action is now, and turned in my resignation at my consulting job (okay, so I had turned in my notice on Friday, but the speech just reaffirmed what I had done, for me anyway). So, in another 2 or 3 weeks - I’m trying to remain flexible - I will be able to answer the question “So what do you do?” with “I’m a pilot!”. It is definitely scary, but I have the full support of my wife, and although I can always fall back on IT if the going gets too rocky, I have a funny feeling that I’ll never look back. I certainly don’t plan to!

I celebrated by doing pattern work with a student in the snow on Saturday. We called it quits when the visibility dropped to VFR minimums, but it was pretty while it lasted. At one point I remarked that it was “cool”, to which my student responded “yeah, for you!”.

I celebrated the New Year in a most satisfying fashion: with my first private pilot students. I wish I had some exciting tales to tell of hanging from a balcony on Bourbon Street with various parts of strange women’s anatomy pressed against me, but I’m older and wiser now (plus I did that once, and if I ever find that video tape it gets burned immediately…but I digress).

The actual New Year’s eve was spent with family and friends in a condo at what we refer to as a “ski resort” here on the east coast. It was a great four day weekend, and I was almost a complete vegetable when it was over, which was the primary goal in addition to teaching our 4.5 year old how to ski, which I think we agreed was a total failure.

Anyway, with the holidays firmly behind us, I set out with my first two students, with one flight on Saturday and two on Sunday. The Saturday flight went well, aside from the fact that it took me twice as long to do things as it should have. I chalked that up to first time inefficiencies, which should be worked out with time. Fast forward to Sunday morning towards the tail end of the training flight. I had the plane because there was a bit of a gusty crosswind and it was her very first lesson, so she was following me on the controls. Just as we add landing flaps at the key position (in a Diamond) she says “what happens if I get sick?”

I tell her that I’ve got it from there and to just relax and focus her attention outside the plane. On base she says “I really think I’m going to be sick”. As we roll onto final she says “I’m not gonna make it” I furiously dig for the sick sack and hand it to her, and just as I grease the mains on, she utilizes the sick sack. The Diamond has a bubble-type canopy, and when it is already warm out and the sun is beating down on you, it can get quite hot inside. I think that was a part of it, coupled with the timing of me taking the controls, which left her brain with little to do, other than inform her stomach that it was queasy.

Oh well, she says she’ll come back, time will tell.

No, not on the Internet. I’m writing this so obviously I must be…oh, never mind. What I mean, is that I’m almost online as a flight instructor! It’s been a few since my last post, so an update is in order.

After coming home from my CFI training, I contacted the two flight schools in the local area. RIC is the domain of ATP, and now that I sit here and think about it, I guess they could be an option once I get the -II (soon) and MEI (not on the horizon). At any rate, I contacted the two flight schools and impatiently awaited the opportunity to interview with the both. After what seemed like an eternity of a week and a few days, I finally had my two interviews scheduled. Now, as someone with an IT background, I’ve been to quite a few interviews in the last 10 years. Because of the demand for my IT skills, I never really felt any pressure going into an interview, because there was always “someone else” that would hire me. Despite the almost rabid demand for flight instructors, I was nervous as heck going into both interviews. Maybe it was because there are only two players in town. Maybe it was because it was it is a new endeavor and I want to get off to a good start in my new career field. Maybe, and probably, it was some of both. Whatever the case, I was nervous. Both were relaxed affairs, and, long story short, ended in my getting job offers. I should have expected it, with the demand levels, but you never know. Of course, it’s always nice to be wanted.

After much gnashing of teeth, I chose the “other guy”, as in the one that I did NOT do my flight training at. My home FBO was definitely disappointed, but understanding. The main two reasons I made the choice were 1) pay and 2) opportunity. I think it’s hard to argue with that. My new employer is part of a larger entity that includes a busy charter department, and it’s written right in the handbook that, if the need exists, flight instructors can transition into flying charters. That is a very nice option to have.

After another eternity of two weeks, I finally got into the aircraft this week for my checkouts. My flight school has a mixed Cessna and Diamond fleet, although they are about to become a certified Diamond training center, which is pretty exciting with the prospect of getting one or more Diamond TwinStars online and having D-Jets in and out from time to time. We were also recently awarded the distinction of being the sole distributor of Diamond aircraft in a 6 state area, which is also very exciting. The more I write, the better I feel about making the decision I did. So anyway, for my checkouts I had to go up in a DA-20, which I’ve never flown, and a C-172 which I’ve flown A LOT. One of our instructors is a retired airline pilot, and he did my checkout in the Diamond. It is a slick and slippery little airplane, and it’s easy to get up into the yellow arc if you don’t watch your speed. In fact, my first landing was actually not a landing, but a go around for that reason. I turned final at 90 kts, and could never get rid of it. I couldn’t even get into the white for the last notch of flaps, which would have been just what I needed. On the second trip, we used approach flaps on the downwind, “just like you’ll do it at the airlines” Jim told me. That sent a little chill up my spine. Jim likes to spread the Diamond checkout over two flights, so I’ve got one more coming up. I’m rather looking forward to it.

The Cessna checkout was a non-event, oh, except for me performing the worst steep turns I’ve ever done. It took four tries to get them to standard. And I’m supposed to teach people to do this??? I would have been really rattled if I hadn’t just ripped off some brilliant flight at MCA at about 37 knots without losing a foot of altitude (yes, I’m stroking the ego to compensate for those nasty steep turns). Our chief flight instructor dismissed it as “rust”…whatever you say, you’re the boss!

I also decided that today was the day to let the boss (the IT one) know that sometime in the near future I’d be leaving as a full-time consultant. It wasn’t an official resignation, more of a heads up. My hope is that I can transition to a part time IT guy and fly 4 days per week. That will help ease the shock of giving up so much income, while letting me build my time at a faster rate. He seemed to be understanding and very appreciative of the notice. Just goes to show, too much communication is never a bad thing…unless you’re hogging the airwaves, but ATC will let you know about it.

This is aviation cliche, but I can’t believe that I’m getting paid to fly airplanes. If you can say “I can’t believe I get paid to do this” about whatever you do, you are in a good place and be grateful. My wife is truly an angel sent to me - one with the patience and understanding of a saint. I would not have come this far without her love and support, and I won’t continue without it. I give all the glory to her, and to the Man upstairs for planting this passion in my heart. I hope one day I can show her the same support that she has shown me. Although…I know what she wants, and it requires diaper changes…the day that our daughter was potty trained was one of the best days of my life, not looking forward to that part again….

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Originally uploaded by jkirksey

This is mostly a test to see if I can add photos from my flickr account. It has the added benefit of sharing some of the beauty that I experienced in Colorado. Took this one hiking around Lily Lake just south of Estes Park, CO.