Airline Pilot Central

Young men and women huddle in small groups, each chattering with barely held excitement. Boasts of aviating valor and masterful flying skills are tempered with humble stories of benign days flight instructing. Who has flown what? Where is the wildest you have flown into? How much turbine time do you have? The chatter goes on for a few more minutes until the door slams shut, heads whip around and the instructor launches into the class. Standing ramrod straight, thinning hair combed over the top of a well tanned dome, deep wrinkles cut into a weathered face, the man spits a slug of chewing tobacco into a small paper cup. “Welcome to Slingblade Airlines, people. My name is Jack Smith and I am your ground instructor.” And with that, your aviation career has begun in earnest.

     Your first few days of ground school are long and dizzying. Regulations that you once memorized for flight instructing and cargo are now being crushed under the weight of additional regulations that you must know inside and out. The instructor may be one of the colorful few, regaling you with tales like the time he was forced to jam his full arm out the cockpit window at 200 kts to hold the wing on after the spars detached, all while hemorrhaging fuel, on an approach to minimums with an 88 kt gusting crosswind and a comatose first officer bleeding profusely from accidentally jamming a hotel pen into his femoral artery during the rough ride. Or, if lady luck left you at the bar the night before, he or she may be one of the human Dow Jones computer types, unleashing a steady stream of monotonous jabber in which you are supposed to strain out all the information you’ll need to pass. Either way, you are finally occupying a seat at an airline and they are actually paying you to learn all of this information.

     The usual flow of ground school runs like a meandering river, a few areas of pooling where you can catch up, and a few violent rapids, where you are gulping to figure out what happened yesterday in today’s class. Indoctrination, or indoc, is usually the first step. The airline has a way of doing things and expects you to follow those rules. They have set forth policies, such as no dangling feather earrings on men or no leather uniform pants for the ladies, that promote an image they want to convey to the flying public. There will be lectures on sexual harassment, job descriptions, management structure and a vast array of other topics. The airlines union will get in with a hearty lunch of pizza and soda to present their function and terms as well. These are the core of the company and relate to your job on a day to day operation.

     With a firm grip of understanding the basics the company expects of you, the next class will be the general operation manual, or GOM class. Here, you will have a variety of mind numbing formulas and general regulations that you will use on a some what regular basis. There will be deriving minimums and alternates, and other wildly exciting topics, such as rest requirements and duty times, along with the odd, 2 page long algorithmic formula that allows you to compute your rest requirements after a duty day. There will also be more regulations, many of which, in your zeal to impress the ground school instructor, you may have began memorizing during one of your students 264 cross country adventures to the nearest airport you could find. This usually lasts a few days, and by this time, you are ready to bend metal beams around your skull to keep your brain inside it. It can be long and tedious, this ground school stuff, but there will be a time when it comes in handy. To help keep you somewhat focused, a taste of the brass ring is usually bestowed upon you by now in the form of aircraft assignments. That gleaming jet, hellion of the skies in her feisty paint job and rear mounted turbine engines, has your name on it, and with every passing moment of babbling about duty times and regulations, your dream of pushing those thrust levers to the firewall and blasting off into the mighty flight levels above gets closer.