Last Wednesday I began IOE with Colgan. IOE stands for Initial Operating Experience. You fly with a Captain who is also whats known as a Check Airmen. A Check Airmen is given special training to fly with new guys. IOE is normally about 20 - 25 hours of flying time with Colgan. During IOE you are flying real routes with passengers in the back. No they dont know that the guy up front of brand new, and you dont ever want them to know this. After IOE you are released and allowed to fly with any other...

v1valarob

The day after we passed our indoctrination test we where sent to St Louis, Missouri for training in the Saab Simulator. Colgan gives us 7 sim sessions and then a proficiency check. Sim is basically one huge mind ####, to be honest. The first day you fly the sim you are just getting used to it, we went out and did steep turns, stalls and shot a few instrument approaches. Thats where the normal flying stopped.


Sim sessions 2 through 7 are just pretty much the worst things. After...

v1valarob

So I failed at keeping this up to date. But ground school is pretty intense and the last thing you think about is keeping your blog up to date.


6 weeks ago (or there abouts..) I started Saab ground school with Colgan. Ground school for the Saab is in Manassas, which is where I instructed and 25 minutes from where I lived. This made my experience much different from everyone else in my class. Everyone else who attends a 121 ground school is NORMALLY away from home and is able...

v1valarob

Yesterday we began to talk about the plane. It was pretty much a summary of the aircraft in general. Quite a few limitations given to us that need to be note carded and etched into memory.

Today however was the electric system. It was exactly like everyone said, drinking water from a fire hose. I think the electric system is going to be my weak point. However I havent looked over everything we went over today in class, and maybe studying on my own I can make some sense of it all. ...

v1valarob

So lets not beat around the bush, AMR, the parent company to American and American Eagle had to make a decision due to rising fuel prices. Their decision was that for AMR to start making some cash ($300 million dollar loss in the first quarter of this year,) they would have to ground planes. Between 70 and 80 plane, 30 - 40 of those planes are going to be Eagle planes. That comes out to be about 400 pilots. At the point this decision was made, they decided to cancel all future training classes....

v1valarob