Training camp

My sim partner was from Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec. A quiet, soft-spoken young King Air pilot named Jean-Francois (JF for short), he had flown in a two-crew environment before, but was not accustomed to autopilots. We rehearsed standard calls and procedures together when we were both in town at the same time, but unfortunately he went home to Rouyn on every break. It made getting prepared a bit more of a challenge. There were others I would have preferred as my sim partner, but he turned out to be a good match, despite his strong accent. I’m sure he was wishing I spoke better French.

This phase of training involved a machine called an “IPT”, an array of touch-sensitive computer screens arranged to look like a Dash-8 instrument panel. Essentially, it was a simulator of the flight simulator we would start flying next month. We would sit in office chairs and touch the screens to make the various switches and buttons do things. This was to practice what Jazz called a “flow”, a way of geographically sweeping across the panel at a particular phase of flight before reading through the checklist. Each day, we simulated a trip somewhere, learning how to read flight plans, program the Flight Management System (FMS), and make the right calls back and forth to each other.

We got through Phase 2 of the training at the end of May. All our instructors said we were very prepared for each session. We mostly scored 3’s on all our items (4 being “above standard” and 1 being “fail”). We were not expected to get more than a 3 on anything, since none of us had flown a Dash-8 before.

The last day of Phase 2 was an exciting one for me. We were all driven to the Jazz maintenance hangar after a late evening groundschool where we finished our last of three technical exams. Here, we met up with a flight attendant from the Inflight Training department, and we were taken out to a Dash-8 100. We all got on board and sat in the cabin, learning how to open each emergency exit door, the main airstair door, and the hatch over our heads in the flight deck. We also were shown how to change lightbulbs as part of Elementary Maintenance.

Sitting up front in the right seat, I was thinking, “This is the real airplane, the real thing. I’ll be sitting up here for real in about a month, flying with a bunch of passengers and flight attendant behind that door.” It was an exciting thought. It was also terrifying.

After a few days’ break, all 20 of us got back together for another 4 days of classroom sessions. More Crew Resource Management, great. Almost everyone had a hard time staying awake. But it was great to see all my classmates again. It would be the last time all of us were together in the same place.