Episode 90

SPC090 [BTC] A Tragic Past - Changing The Pilots (ATP-CTP)

In Episode 90, Beyond the Checkride, Bill and Kent reflect on the 2009 Colgan Air 3407 crash near Buffalo and how it drove regulatory changes including the 1,500-hour rule and the FAA-required ATP Certification Training Program (ATP-CTP). They discuss what ATP-CTP is, how provider and instructor quality can vary, and what Kent experienced taking it independently (about $4,000) with nearly 3,000 hours and single-engine turbine Part 135 time. They outline regulatory requirements (30 hours ground, 10 hours simulator) covering high-altitude aerodynamics, weather radar, air carrier operations, and CRM/leadership, emphasizing lessons from accidents like Air France 447, Tenerife, United 232, and American 965. Kent describes key sim takeaways such as high-altitude stall recovery requiring nose-down and significant altitude loss, automation differences, EGPWS/windshear maneuvers, and the importance of mindset, SOPs, checklists, and professionalism.

Get the free Go or No-Go guide: https://studentpilotcast.com/three-questions

Get the Friday Flight Brief: https://studentpilotcast.com/flightbrief

Links:

Hope you enjoy the episode and thanks for listening! Visit the SPC website at https://studentpilotcast.com. Please keep the feedback coming. You can use the contact form on the website or send email to bill at student pilot cast dot com. The theme song for our episodes is "To Be an Angel" by the band, "Uncle Seth".

Legal Notice: Remember, any instruction that you hear in this podcast was meant for the student and only for the situation that they happened to be in at the time. Please do not try to apply anything you see or hear in this episode or any other episode to your own flying. If you have questions about any aspect of your flying, please consult a qualified CFI.

Copyright 2008-2026, studentpilotcast.com and Bill Williams

Transcript
Speaker:

February 12th, 2009, Thursday, a Q400 is on approach into Buffalo.

Speaker:

The crew's tired.

Speaker:

First officer's been awake since the day before, and somewhere in

Speaker:

that cockpit something goes wrong that should never, ever happen: a

Speaker:

stall, and the wrong response to it.

Speaker:

49 people on that plane never made it home, and one person on the ground who

Speaker:

died in the house that the airplane hit.

Speaker:

Out of that wreckage came a bunch of regulational changes.

Speaker:

Out of those changes, a training program, and out of that training

Speaker:

program came today's episode.

Speaker:

This is BTC episode 90 of the Student Pilot Cast, A Tragic Past

Speaker:

Changing the Pilots, or ATP CTP

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

Hey, everybody.

Speaker:

Welcome back to the Student Pilot Cast.

Speaker:

I'm Bill, and this is Beyond the Checkride.

Speaker:

Here at the Student Pilot Cast, we fly and we learn, and we occasionally get

Speaker:

a little nerdy about the regulatory history of aviation training programs,

Speaker:

got our buddy Kent back for another Beyond the Checkride, and if you've

Speaker:

been listening a while, you know Kent is one of those guys who just

Speaker:

kinda lives and breathes this stuff.

Speaker:

He's like my aviation nerd mentor.

Speaker:

We could talk airplanes for six hours, and neither of one of us would even notice.

Speaker:

Anyway, he's been on quite a journey this past year, going from where a

Speaker:

lot of us are right now to sitting in the right seat of a business jet.

Speaker:

And before he could do any of that, he had to go through something

Speaker:

called the ATP Certification Training Program, the ATP-CTP.

Speaker:

And here's what I want you to understand before we get into it.

Speaker:

That program exists because of a crash, a completely preventable crash.

Speaker:

some 50 people died, and the aviation world looked at itself in the mirror

Speaker:

and said, "We have to do better." The ATP-CTP is part of what came

Speaker:

out of trying to do better, at least what it looks like on paper.

Speaker:

And today, Kent's gonna tell us what it looks like in real life.

Speaker:

So whether you got 10 hours or 1,300 hours, this one's for you.

Speaker:

Welcome back, Kent, after our little holding pattern.

Speaker:

we're back again, and I'm excited to be back in the cockpit with you talking

Speaker:

again where we happen to record it.

Speaker:

How are you?

Speaker:

I'm great, and I'm laughing because you said we're gonna be a little nerdy.

Speaker:

we're gonna go full nerdy on this one,

Speaker:

Oh, sweet.

Speaker:

do.

Speaker:

But that's the best part of aviation is there's always new stuff to learn, right?

Speaker:

And,

Speaker:

Totally

Speaker:

sadly, it wasn't really that aviation, looked at ourselves

Speaker:

and said we need to do better.

Speaker:

Congress looked at us after Colgan 3407 and said, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot."

Speaker:

and yeah, that Colgan 3407 crash led to both the ATP CTP rule and the

Speaker:

1500-hour rule that so many people are, not enjoying these days, let's

Speaker:

Lamenting?

Speaker:

Yes

Speaker:

yeah, but you know what?

Speaker:

That 1500-hour rule moved the bar enough on, just the amount of effort

Speaker:

and money it takes for entry into the industry that it completely

Speaker:

changed compensation in the industry.

Speaker:

I-- when I first got my commercial pilot certificate, the entry into the airline

Speaker:

world was you go fly a Beech 1900 for Great Lakes Airlines for $19 an hour,

Speaker:

and that's a flight hour, and you're limited to a thousand of those in a year.

Speaker:

So obviously the money was awful and, pilots were delivering pizzas on the

Speaker:

side when they were at home and such, and

Speaker:

Yeah

Speaker:

we want the best people in the seat.

Speaker:

and even though that means that you may have to slog it out in the right

Speaker:

seat of a 172 bopping around the pattern a little more or, there's a

Speaker:

lot of other ways to get to 1500 hours.

Speaker:

I'm not even a CFI, lots of ways to skin that cat.

Speaker:

But, because of that, it really changed the face of compensation in the industry.

Speaker:

And so that's why when you make it to the right seat at Envoy now, you actually

Speaker:

make pretty good money, instead of the poverty wages that used to happen.

Speaker:

Yeah, it's actually those

Speaker:

made the industry better in other ways too

Speaker:

Yeah, those, those wages when I was a young buck is one of the things

Speaker:

that dissuaded me from a career I, I thought I would really love,

Speaker:

you know, being an airline pilot.

Speaker:

but I was in my early 20s and going, "Man, there's a lot of other ways to

Speaker:

make money. That seems like a long slog." So there's probably a lot more

Speaker:

people like me who would have loved it and maybe even been a little bit good at

Speaker:

it, but, you know, that kinda dissuaded us, so now we see kind of an influx.

Speaker:

professionals in the industry now

Speaker:

That is true.

Speaker:

That is true.

Speaker:

But yeah, it has, it has changed a lot of things, that, that Colgan

Speaker:

Air tra- crash, as tragic as it was, hopefully good things come out of it.

Speaker:

So we're gonna learn kind of the reality of this today, right, a little bit.

Speaker:

We're gonna get to tag along with you and see what way beyond the,

Speaker:

at least the private checkride is, with, with the ATP, CTP.

Speaker:

So you've already kinda talked about how, you know, it's, it kinda

Speaker:

went along with the 1,500 hours.

Speaker:

That means, you know, people going into ATP, CTP are a lot more experienced

Speaker:

flying than, in the past before 2007, 2008, you know, once they were already

Speaker:

flying for the airlines, right?

Speaker:

So, does, does that make a big difference, do you think?

Speaker:

I've heard a lot of people say, "Do you have 1,500 hours or do you have

Speaker:

one hour 1,500 times?" obviously you learn a lot more when you're new at

Speaker:

something than you do down the road.

Speaker:

so that's why there's some debate about whether that 1,500-hour rule really is

Speaker:

making that big of a difference because is another thousand times around the

Speaker:

pattern in that 172 really going to make the difference between a good pilot and a

Speaker:

bad pilot when it comes to flying a jet?

Speaker:

really, that's what the ATP CTP course is about, is bridging the

Speaker:

gap from the right seat of a 172 to the right seat of a jet, and

Speaker:

Hmm

Speaker:

is a completely different experience flying a jet than

Speaker:

it is flying a single piston

Speaker:

Hmm.

Speaker:

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Speaker:

It's kind of y- you go through levels of professionalism through your

Speaker:

career, and, going from, like you said, the right seat of a 172 to the

Speaker:

right seat of a jet is a big leap.

Speaker:

So there probably needs to be some, some good training there

Speaker:

Definitely

Speaker:

So a lot of people may not even know what ATP/CTP is.

Speaker:

Do you wanna explain it a little bit?

Speaker:

So it is that bridge from the single engine piston world to the jet world.

Speaker:

that's what it was always intended to be.

Speaker:

even though Congress forced the extra training on us, it was the

Speaker:

FAA that kind of decided what really should go into that training.

Speaker:

there are a number of what you might call landmark accidents, that the causes

Speaker:

of them all went into this course.

Speaker:

obviously at this point, you could call Colgan 3407 a landmark

Speaker:

accident just because of how much it changed the industry.

Speaker:

some other ones that are looked at least in the course I took, Air

Speaker:

France 447, which was the one that was flying from South America to Paris and

Speaker:

stalled at a high altitude and remained stalled all the way into the ocean.

Speaker:

so aerodynamics it-- at high altitudes and stall recoveries at high

Speaker:

altitudes are covered in the course.

Speaker:

but there's a whole lot of stuff around professionalism, which was

Speaker:

somewhat lacking in that cockpit as well as in some other, accidents.

Speaker:

I don't have the flight number in front of me right now, but there was a…

Speaker:

I honestly forget which regional it was, but it was, Northwest Airlink, where it

Speaker:

was just a deadhead flight, there were two young pilots who, made a lot of

Speaker:

bad decisions and had an unprofessional environment in the cockpit, managed to

Speaker:

get both engines to flame out on the jet that they were flying and crashed it.

Speaker:

all of those different accidents that the FAA looked at and said, "Hey,

Speaker:

we can do better and we need to do better", are covered in the course.

Speaker:

So we can kinda go through, some of the subject matter, and I think we will here.

Speaker:

but I'm-- I'll let you take the lead on where we go

Speaker:

Sure, sure.

Speaker:

Well, I just wanna get a couple of personal, things out of the way

Speaker:

that, you know, worked out for you.

Speaker:

What did your total time and ratings look like when you went in so our

Speaker:

l- listeners can kinda get an idea of where you were at in your career?

Speaker:

I looked very different from the rest of the people in the course because,

Speaker:

again, most of them, with maybe three exceptions were, that person who's

Speaker:

been sitting in the right seat of a 172 teaching people how to fly.

Speaker:

and, they're getting to that point where they're close to 1,500 hours

Speaker:

and they want to be able to take that ATP written and get that out of the

Speaker:

way and put it on their resume so that they can hopefully get hired by an

Speaker:

airline, Yeah, I had almost 3,000 hours, several hundred hours of turbine time

Speaker:

experience as a 135 captain, but it was all in single engine turboprops, so I

Speaker:

did not have the multi-engine ATP, so I probably got some different things

Speaker:

out of the course than some other people did, and I nodded my head a lot.

Speaker:

I was

Speaker:

Yeah

Speaker:

at that former one thirty-five that I was at, so I have, seen a lot of stuff

Speaker:

about a lot of these accidents and written things about them and tried

Speaker:

to take the lessons from them and, communicate them to pilots myself before.

Speaker:

definitely was a different experience for me than it was for

Speaker:

some of the other people in there.

Speaker:

Okay.

Speaker:

Yeah, that's interesting 'cause you come in with a … Like you said,

Speaker:

you're not a, you're not a CFI.

Speaker:

You came in with a lot of different experience, a lot of real-world

Speaker:

experience and, and a lot of professional flying experience.

Speaker:

So with that in mind, do you, do you think it was more or less rigorous than you

Speaker:

expected or kind of what you expected?

Speaker:

I have heard from some people that their experience with that course

Speaker:

was, that it was taught by somebody who didn't really know anything and

Speaker:

just played them a bunch of YouTube videos, which is really unfortunate.

Speaker:

unfortunate, yeah

Speaker:

experience was the guy that, the guy that taught the ground portion of my

Speaker:

ATP/CTP course was a retired American captain, and he did a great job.

Speaker:

and he gave some of the backstory on some of the accidents that involved American

Speaker:

that don't make it into the NTSB report.

Speaker:

there was one in particular that was a weather-related crash where

Speaker:

all these other flights were getting canceled, and this guy apparently

Speaker:

had a mistress at the destination that they were going to that night,

Speaker:

Oh my goodness

Speaker:

went around looking for an airplane at a gate that was flyable and then,

Speaker:

up dispatch and said, "Hey, I found an airplane here and I wanna go."

Speaker:

and unfortunately, that led to his death as well as several others,

Speaker:

when they crashed at the destination.

Speaker:

Hmm.

Speaker:

lot of interesting backstories there, though, and, part of what you get from

Speaker:

that is just that, what was this person's decision-making mentality that day?

Speaker:

'cause that really affects, the outcome of some of these things.

Speaker:

your decision-making is really what makes you a good or a bad pilot.

Speaker:

so it's always important to keep that in mind and make sure you're

Speaker:

in the right frame of mind when you're making those decisions.

Speaker:

So I really felt like I got a lot of good value out of that course,

Speaker:

hearing some of that extra stuff.

Speaker:

But, yeah, I thought he did a really great job.

Speaker:

that sounds good.

Speaker:

It sounds like it was probably a pretty good experience for you.

Speaker:

So w- what study materials did you use?

Speaker:

Did you have a sense for how some of the approved programs for ATP/CTP differ?

Speaker:

Well, there really weren't any study materials.

Speaker:

That's the, kind of the whole thing with this ATP/CTP.

Speaker:

There's, it's just ground and sim.

Speaker:

There is no checkride or any of that kind of stuff.

Speaker:

And so, it was actually kind of nice to have a training experience where you can

Speaker:

just kind of go into it with an open mind and, and just sit back and soak it in.

Speaker:

Got a lot of good value out of it, but didn't really have to put

Speaker:

a ton into it before it started

Speaker:

All right, excellent.

Speaker:

Well, was there anything that surprised you about the content?

Speaker:

Not a lot, mostly because like I said, I've, I've been in aviation

Speaker:

safety before and I've, I've been around flying for over 20 years now.

Speaker:

And so, you know, I remember a lot of these crashes when they happened.

Speaker:

Right

Speaker:

in fact, I knew a guy who was flying for Colgan at the time 3407 crashed.

Speaker:

you know, and I, I remember Air France 447.

Speaker:

I have a lot of thoughts on that particular crash.

Speaker:

But, so yeah, I was, I was aware of almost all of the stuff in the course already.

Speaker:

but, you know, hearing it from the perspective of a guy who's been an airline

Speaker:

captain for 40 years, you know, that was, that was really, a good experience

Speaker:

Hmm.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

So

Speaker:

Did you choose the provider who, who did the class, or was that

Speaker:

chosen for you by your employer?

Speaker:

Or how, how did that work?

Speaker:

No, I actually did this class before I got my current job.

Speaker:

you know, the hiring market here in the last couple of years, uh, ever

Speaker:

since the door plug blew out of the Alaska Airlines 737 has not been great.

Speaker:

And so anything you can do to make yourself look better is, is a good thing.

Speaker:

And so I just kind of did this one on my own dime, just to say,

Speaker:

"Yeah, I checked that box already."

Speaker:

Well, that's actually good for us for, for this discussion.

Speaker:

How did you choose the provider?

Speaker:

what process did you go through?

Speaker:

Was it word of mouth?

Speaker:

Did you do some research?

Speaker:

Well, I actually called up our old buddy Steve Tupper, 'cause I

Speaker:

knew he had done it, and, asked him what his experience was like.

Speaker:

And I looked at, a couple of other providers, and they were

Speaker:

kind of all the same price.

Speaker:

They were all, like, right at $4,000.

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

and it just, just so happened I could get in with this one the quickest.

Speaker:

And were you pretty familiar with ATP/CTP before going in?

Speaker:

I know you were familiar with the concepts, but had you really heard a lot

Speaker:

about how these programs, run, or did you kinda have to learn it as you went along?

Speaker:

I've, I've talked to a couple people about it and, you know, like I said,

Speaker:

I had heard from some people that it was just, you know, being fed some

Speaker:

YouTube videos in a classroom and they were pretty disappointed with it.

Speaker:

but, you know, that wasn't my experience, which I'm, I'm very glad for.

Speaker:

Yeah, choosing the provider is really important, isn't it?

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Well, and honestly, I think I got lucky because I may have, may have actually

Speaker:

had the same provider as some of the people who didn't have a good experience.

Speaker:

So it, it may have just been the, the luck of the draw that I got the

Speaker:

good instructor as opposed to the one who maybe wasn't even a pilot.

Speaker:

Hmm.

Speaker:

Interesting.

Speaker:

Well, I'm gonna ask you to dive into, kind of the content the program a little

Speaker:

bit, so you can be ready for that.

Speaker:

But before we do that, I, I wanted to get a sense from you how your fellow

Speaker:

classmates, the other pilots, did you find that they were generally taking

Speaker:

it really seriously, being really professional, or, was it kind of a

Speaker:

checkbox item for, for a lot of them?

Speaker:

I think, you know, it seemed like everybody in, in my class was,

Speaker:

was really into it and paying attention, for the most part.

Speaker:

even though I-- and this is one of the other reasons I went with this particular

Speaker:

provider, I was in a remote course, so the ground for mine, I was able to be at home.

Speaker:

Oh, interesting.

Speaker:

and everyone else was as well.

Speaker:

Now, part of that is that they actually have someone watching you.

Speaker:

You have to have your camera turned on, and they have, in addition to the

Speaker:

instructor, they have a monitor whose entire job is to sit there and watch

Speaker:

everybody's video feed, and if it looks like you're not paying attention,

Speaker:

they'll, they're gonna squawk at you.

Speaker:

Hmm, interesting.

Speaker:

in fact, I was, I was warned about that in advance because, like some other people,

Speaker:

I have several monitors on my home setup.

Speaker:

And so,

Speaker:

You

Speaker:

you know, I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here looking at you on my laptop,

Speaker:

but, you know, over here is my notes and over here is, you know, a web

Speaker:

browser and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

Well, Kent, if you don't mind, why don't you take us through the content

Speaker:

of the course, what, what it's like?

Speaker:

let's start with the regulatory portions, what's required to be in

Speaker:

there, and then we'll kind of finish up with your experience, what you

Speaker:

talked about, what you learned, you know, the different experiences with

Speaker:

the sim, because I believe there's a sim component for this, right?

Speaker:

There is

Speaker:

yeah.

Speaker:

So let, let's start with the regulatory.

Speaker:

Like, what is required to be part of this class?

Speaker:

So it's 30 hours of classroom and 10 hours in the sim is the minimum requirement.

Speaker:

The classroom is split up into eight hours of aerodynamics, including

Speaker:

high-altitude aerodynamics, two hours of meteorology and weather

Speaker:

detection systems, aka onboard radar,

Speaker:

14 hours of air carrier operations, which is split into a bunch of things that I

Speaker:

can go through here in a sec, and then six hours of leadership, professional

Speaker:

development, CRM, and safety culture.

Speaker:

That 14 hours of air carrier operations covers physiology, communications,

Speaker:

checklist philosophy, operational control, minimum equipment list and CDL.

Speaker:

I'm blanking on the configuration deviation list, ground operations, turbine

Speaker:

engines, transport category performance, and then automation, navigation,

Speaker:

and flight path warning systems.

Speaker:

So all stuff that's more geared toward high-altitude operations, multi-crew

Speaker:

operations, turbine operations, the air carrier operations, getting into parts

Speaker:

121, 135, 125, all of those different things that are very different than

Speaker:

your single-engine piston operations that most people are coming from.

Speaker:

Cool.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

So from a regulatory standpoint, which is th- this is found in

Speaker:

61-156, I believe, those are the things that have to be covered.

Speaker:

take us through a little bit of that.

Speaker:

What was it like for you?

Speaker:

What were some of the aha moments and, and things like that?

Speaker:

Well, again, I already had experience with some of this stuff, just because

Speaker:

I had previous 135 experience.

Speaker:

But, You know, I'll, I'll kind of just start at the top here and,

Speaker:

and throw a few things out there.

Speaker:

you know, aerodynamics and high-altitude operations.

Speaker:

things are different when you're way up there in the, the really thin air.

Speaker:

if you think about your minimum speed, where you're gonna stall, versus your

Speaker:

maximum speed, where you're gonna hit, you know, in a piston, it's VNE.

Speaker:

in a turbine aircraft, you'd usually have a, a VMO and an MMO, maximum operating.

Speaker:

as you climb, that minimum speed is going to be faster and faster.

Speaker:

really, it's gonna be roughly the same indicated air speed, but of course,

Speaker:

as you climb, you are going faster for the same indicated air speed

Speaker:

because the air is getting thinner.

Speaker:

But the other thing that's happening is at the other end, you know, so your,

Speaker:

your minimum speed's going like this, your maximum speed is coming down.

Speaker:

And so you get into a situation, called coffin corner, where in certain aircraft

Speaker:

types, there's only maybe 10 knots in between your maximum speed and your

Speaker:

minimum speed when you get high enough.

Speaker:

I think that applies to some of the Lears and probably the Citation

Speaker:

X that's, you know, some of these planes are certified up to 51,000

Speaker:

feet, and so when you get really high like that, things are very different.

Speaker:

so that's,

Speaker:

so

Speaker:

that's one thing that they talk about

Speaker:

explain aerodynamically, this is where we get to geek out.

Speaker:

Explain aerodynamically, where, what the dangers are there, you know,

Speaker:

in Coffin's Corner, so to speak

Speaker:

Well, if you, if you got all the way to the altitude where those

Speaker:

meet, you are simultaneously at, you know, your maximum speed and

Speaker:

your stall speed at the same time.

Speaker:

which obviously you can't really get all the way to the corner there, but,

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

have an ever-decreasing margin, for speed on either side of where you are.

Speaker:

and,

Speaker:

and that

Speaker:

you know, a student pilot practices stalls all the time.

Speaker:

What's different about stalls at those high altitudes?

Speaker:

That's kind of that danger, area, right?

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Well, one of those things, that's one of the things that they covered

Speaker:

in the sim was high-altitude stalls, because it's not like it just kinda,

Speaker:

you know, pitches over on you.

Speaker:

It's, it's gonna start to buffet first.

Speaker:

and one of the points that they were really trying to make was that,

Speaker:

yeah, you may be in a transport category jet with tons and tons of

Speaker:

thrust at takeoff, but really a jet engine is a normally aspirated engine

Speaker:

It is a turbine, but it is a normally aspirated engine.

Speaker:

The higher you climb, the less air is going into it

Speaker:

yeah, yeah,

Speaker:

And so you don't necessarily have as much excess thrust up

Speaker:

at altitude as you do down low.

Speaker:

and so one of the things that they demonstrated with us in the sim was that

Speaker:

you cannot power out of a stall even with a couple of big jet engines on you.

Speaker:

and it-- that was, that was an eye-opener.

Speaker:

They basically had us get it to the first indication of a stall

Speaker:

at thirty-five thousand feet and then try and power out of it.

Speaker:

And they timed it, and it took two full minutes to recover

Speaker:

from the stall by trying to hold altitude and power out of it.

Speaker:

and so the point there was you got to get that nose down.

Speaker:

now, you don't want to be going negative G on a transport category jet.

Speaker:

all kinds of bad things can happen, you know, not the least of which

Speaker:

would be you might be unporting your fuel and then causing your

Speaker:

engines to quit too, which, you know, that's going to be a really bad day.

Speaker:

and so your recovery is to drop a wing and get the nose down quickly

Speaker:

that way without causing negative G.

Speaker:

And then, I mean, you get the nose quite a bit down, like twenty degrees down, so you

Speaker:

don't see any blue at all in the window.

Speaker:

And then you get that airspeed back up first, and then you start to recover.

Speaker:

And that recovery, when you're that high, I mean, I think we ate up six or eight

Speaker:

thousand feet of altitude in the recovery.

Speaker:

Now, that sounds like a lot, and it is a lot when you're in a normally

Speaker:

aspirated piston, and you're at three thousand, four thousand feet AGL

Speaker:

maybe, and maybe not even that much.

Speaker:

and that's where we all learned stalls, and that's where we all practice stalls.

Speaker:

And so, you know, we're kind of thinking, "Okay, I'm going to real briefly get

Speaker:

the nose down, you know, relax that back pressure, lower the angle of

Speaker:

attack, and the wing's going to start flying again right away, and then I

Speaker:

need to get that nose back up, not too fast to cause a secondary stall, but

Speaker:

I need to get that nose back up and climb away from the ground because,

Speaker:

hey, the ground is right there," right?

Speaker:

But when you're at thirty-five thousand feet, it doesn't matter

Speaker:

if you lose eight thousand feet in the recovery because you're still--

Speaker:

Well, I guess that, that would get you down to about Everest altitude.

Speaker:

You know?

Speaker:

So the highest point of land in the entire world is twenty-seven

Speaker:

thousand twenty-eight feet, if I remember correctly.

Speaker:

and so, yeah, you have thousands of feet in which to recover, so use it.

Speaker:

and it's, it's just a, it's a very different maneuver than the one

Speaker:

that we all learned and practiced.

Speaker:

and because of the, the fact that both, Colgan 3407 and Air France 447 that we've

Speaker:

already talked about, you know, stalls were part of both of those accidents.

Speaker:

and so stall awareness and recovery is, a big part of what they wanted

Speaker:

to go into this ATP CTP course

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Cool stuff.

Speaker:

See, we get to geek out

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Awesome.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

so w- what other kinds of things did you, did you go over in that,

Speaker:

you know, those mandatory topics that you thought was interesting?

Speaker:

I could talk a little bit about weather radar.

Speaker:

we did have weather radar on the TBMs that I was flying before, but, it was

Speaker:

very nice, you know, new generation Garmin's latest and greatest fun toys.

Speaker:

and, you know, most airplanes now have relatively modern radars.

Speaker:

Some are more automated than the others, but, You know, before you've

Speaker:

actually operated an onboard radar, it kind of sounds like, "Oh, this

Speaker:

will be the greatest thing ever, and it will tell me everything I need to

Speaker:

know, and it won't have any of the weaknesses of NEXRAD and all that."

Speaker:

I can really poke my way through these storms, right?

Speaker:

Yeah, not so much.

Speaker:

you know, they both, Nextrad data link radar and onboard

Speaker:

weather radar have a place, and I actually really like having both.

Speaker:

you know, they each have their own weaknesses, but when you have both,

Speaker:

you can kind of use them to mitigate the weaknesses of the other one.

Speaker:

you know, we of course have the luxury now of having Nextrad in our cockpits

Speaker:

in normally aspirated piston aircraft, which is just a, a massive increase

Speaker:

in safety and dispatchability, for small airplanes since I started flying.

Speaker:

you know, before we had ADSB and XM Weather and that sort of thing available

Speaker:

in the cockpit, I remember taking a trip where I called Flight Watch.

Speaker:

If you remember Flight Watch.

Speaker:

Doesn't exist anymore, but it was a, you know, a flight service, provided service.

Speaker:

and you called in on this frequency, and you'd be listening through a VOR,

Speaker:

and a guy in a room somewhere would be telling you that there's an area

Speaker:

of thunderstorms that's, you know, 100 miles wide, and it's centered 30

Speaker:

miles north of some VOR you've never heard of and have no idea where it is.

Speaker:

And it was just not the most useful thing in the world.

Speaker:

maybe better than nothing, but only marginally.

Speaker:

so having the visualization and really knowing where that is relative to

Speaker:

you is just a, a huge increase in capability for small airplanes, and

Speaker:

I use it all the time in my Mooney.

Speaker:

however, it has weaknesses, right?

Speaker:

if you get a picture that says it's, you know, from right now, it's already

Speaker:

about 10 minutes old because the radar has to sweep all the different altitudes,

Speaker:

and then it puts all those pictures together, sends it out, gotta go up to

Speaker:

satellites and back down potentially.

Speaker:

but it takes a while to put the picture together and transmit it,

Speaker:

and that time that you see on it, is the time that it was transmitted, not

Speaker:

the time that it started being built.

Speaker:

So even if it says you have a brand-new picture, it's still up to 10 minutes old.

Speaker:

and then on top of that, it sometimes takes five or 10 additional

Speaker:

minutes to get that picture to you.

Speaker:

So now you're talking about you might have a picture that's 20 minutes old

Speaker:

when you're looking at Nextrad Onboard radar is real-time, which is great,

Speaker:

but onboard radar also only shows you-- Right, and it's, it's, you know, you

Speaker:

have that, that arc in front of you about 45 degrees either side of your nose.

Speaker:

it's only good for a certain distance out in front of you.

Speaker:

It, it depends on the size of the radar antenna.

Speaker:

the bigger antennas are kind of more focused and, so you get, a beam

Speaker:

that goes farther before it starts getting into ground clutter and such.

Speaker:

But speaking of ground clutter, you know, that stuff all gets automatically

Speaker:

filtered out of that NEXRAD image.

Speaker:

It doesn't get filtered out of your onboard radar image, so then you're

Speaker:

starting to deal with, okay, is there a huge line of storms out there

Speaker:

or am I just painting the ground?

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

and you can usually kind of tell the difference once you've

Speaker:

played with it for a while.

Speaker:

you know, the ground is always gonna be painted a certain distance out,

Speaker:

but it's a much more manual process.

Speaker:

You know, nobody is filtering things out or doing any of those things for you.

Speaker:

You have to gain the knowledge to be able to say, "Okay, what tilt do I

Speaker:

want on my radar? Where am I gonna get the best chance of actually seeing

Speaker:

the precip?" and also am I, you know, am I potentially overshooting some

Speaker:

precip in an attempt to get rid of that ground clutter on my screen?

Speaker:

or, you know, the opposite problem is if your tilt is too low, you might

Speaker:

paint some precip that you're gonna be 10,000 feet over the top of and

Speaker:

you don't really need to worry about.

Speaker:

so there, there's a lot more to learn.

Speaker:

there's a lot more that goes into the interpretation of the

Speaker:

onboard radar, and it also suffers from attenuation sometimes.

Speaker:

So if you have a really big, strong cell that's close to you, you can't

Speaker:

see anything that's behind it.

Speaker:

Right

Speaker:

so the NEXRAD has different sites that can make up for that.

Speaker:

it, yeah

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker:

And so that's where being able to see both pictures is really valuable.

Speaker:

You can say, "Okay, not only is there this one that's close to me, but if I go around

Speaker:

it, I'm gonna get in even more trouble."

Speaker:

And that sort of stuff doesn't show up on the onboard radar.

Speaker:

So, you know, just learning all those strengths and weaknesses of each system

Speaker:

and how to interpret them and use them together, is, is really valuable.

Speaker:

And I think I may have actually gone into more detail just now than

Speaker:

they did in the course, because they talked more, they talked more about

Speaker:

onboard radar, 'cause, you know, a lot of airliners don't have data link.

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Believe it or not, in the jets I'm flying now, we don't have

Speaker:

ADS-B that gets fed to our iPads.

Speaker:

Our iPads are not connected to the panel at all.

Speaker:

We can connect to the internet on our planes, and so we can get our, you know,

Speaker:

we can get the Nexrad picture and our ForeFlight through the internet instead.

Speaker:

Yeah, So I wanna make a note for our listeners.

Speaker:

I'm sure everybody's thinking to themselves, "Well, what is the type that

Speaker:

you're flying?" But hold on, we're gonna do another episode about his type rating,

Speaker:

and we'll talk all about the airplane.

Speaker:

So for now, just be patient.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

So

Speaker:

Sounds good

Speaker:

to, switch over a little bit.

Speaker:

Before we get into the air carrier operations portion, which of course

Speaker:

has a lot of different categories or a lot of different, you know, segments

Speaker:

of information, I'd like to talk a little bit about the leadership part.

Speaker:

how did, how did you find that?

Speaker:

Did you take away some, some good tools, on leadership, CRM, things like that?

Speaker:

CRM, you know, I had already had CRM training before that,

Speaker:

so that wasn't really new to me.

Speaker:

you know, and that's, that's something that you can find in a lot of places.

Speaker:

I think, especially just because we had this really experienced airline

Speaker:

captain teaching the course, probably the best thing I got out of that was

Speaker:

how to communicate with your passengers.

Speaker:

you know, he was very particular about a few things.

Speaker:

Like, he said, "Do not ever lie to your passengers, because if they

Speaker:

figure that out, it's game over. They're never gonna trust you again."

Speaker:

gone.

Speaker:

Yep, that's right

Speaker:

right.

Speaker:

And, you know, and I have a friend who is also a retired airline captain

Speaker:

who we got into this same kind of discussion and, and he was talking about

Speaker:

how, you know, if you get everybody on the same team, things go better.

Speaker:

And he said, you know, for example, you're on a flight, it's already

Speaker:

delayed, and then the airplane breaks, and there's different ways

Speaker:

you can communicate that to people.

Speaker:

But he said, you know, if you just get everybody on the same

Speaker:

team, great things happen.

Speaker:

If you say, "Hey, look, everybody, I know this sucks, and I'm not real

Speaker:

happy about it either, but we have a maintenance issue with our airplane.

Speaker:

We're gonna need to switch to a different airplane.

Speaker:

But if we can all help each other out, we'll get onto this other airplane as

Speaker:

quickly as possible, and we'll get on, you know, we'll get on our way as soon

Speaker:

as we can." And he said, you know, "Once you do that and you get people helping

Speaker:

each other out, everybody's happier."

Speaker:

You know, it's not, "Well, I'm mad at the airline," or, "I'm

Speaker:

mad at the captain," or whatever.

Speaker:

It's, "Hey, let's help each other out," and, you know, we all have

Speaker:

the common goal of getting to where we're going, so, you know, if we

Speaker:

help each other out, we can do it.

Speaker:

and so just how you communicate with your passengers is extremely important.

Speaker:

and he just had all kinds of really, really good examples of that

Speaker:

Excellent.

Speaker:

you know, everybody talks about leadership, um, CRM,

Speaker:

CRM, things like that.

Speaker:

Was there any part of that training that was, I don't know the best term for this,

Speaker:

so I'm gonna make one up, that was more like how to be better at followership?

Speaker:

how to be a, a good junior crew member, you know, things like that

Speaker:

You know, I would actually have to look in my notes for that.

Speaker:

you know, I think there was some talk about that, But I guess, you know, one

Speaker:

of the things that he was talking about was, warning the pilot flying, or the,

Speaker:

the PIC, and how to do that, because there have been some instances where,

Speaker:

for example, the worst airline crash there's ever been, the, the Tenerife

Speaker:

crash, where w- two f- 747s hit each other on the runway, 583 people killed.

Speaker:

One of the things that went into that was on, that was a, a TWA and a KLM,

Speaker:

and on the KLM flight, they had been cleared essentially to line up and

Speaker:

wait, not cleared for takeoff, and the captain read back, "We are at takeoff."

Speaker:

He didn't say cleared for takeoff, so there was some ambiguity to what he said.

Speaker:

But he shoved the throttles forward, and the first officer said, "Are we cleared

Speaker:

for takeoff?" And the captain said, "Ja wel," which in Dutch is an emphatic yes.

Speaker:

and the first officer didn't say anything more.

Speaker:

Yeah

Speaker:

And then this crash happened.

Speaker:

so he gave, a really good example of, in fact, I'm gonna go back to

Speaker:

my notes and, and, read this off.

Speaker:

CUSS words he called it.

Speaker:

Concerned, uncomfortable, safe.

Speaker:

and then also said, okay, inquiry, advocacy, and assertion are

Speaker:

kind of the, the three levels.

Speaker:

So the first thing you do is you say, "Hey, are we cleared for

Speaker:

takeoff?" And if you get a response that's not satisfactory, then

Speaker:

the second one is, "Hey, I don't think we were cleared for takeoff.

Speaker:

You know, let's double-check this before we do anything." The third step is,

Speaker:

"Hey, we're not for, cleared for takeoff.

Speaker:

Abort, abort, abort." So yeah, starting with a warning, then a more emphatic

Speaker:

warning, then a very emphatic, "Do it now," and then take over the aircraft

Speaker:

which hopefully nobody ever gets to that point where they have to

Speaker:

literally take over the aircraft because at that point there's been

Speaker:

poor leadership

Speaker:

breakdown

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

Yeah, really interesting.

Speaker:

Of course, that, that crash you're speaking of happened

Speaker:

in, kind of a different time.

Speaker:

there were different safety cultures and CRM practices at the time,

Speaker:

and it's the reason we've changed, you know, tried to change that

Speaker:

culture in the industry, right?

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Yeah, I believe that crash was in about 1983 or so, if I remember right.

Speaker:

It was the early '80s one way or the other.

Speaker:

and I know that the, the crash that really brought CRM to the forefront and, caused

Speaker:

the FAA to make everybody do CRM training was United Flight 232, which kind of like

Speaker:

the Miracle on the Hudson was one of the rare airline crashes where instead of

Speaker:

looking at everything went, that went wrong, they can look at what went right.

Speaker:

Because even though United 232 did have quite a few fatalities,

Speaker:

it also had a lot of survivors,

Speaker:

a situation where you wouldn't expect that at all.

Speaker:

and for those who aren't familiar, that flight is the… Yeah, that, that

Speaker:

flight is the one, it was a DC-10, I think just going from Denver to Chicago.

Speaker:

and the number two engine, the one on the tail, had an uncontained failure and just

Speaker:

shredded a lot of stuff, including all four hydraulic systems on the airplane.

Speaker:

And so the flight crew did not have any control of the flying

Speaker:

surfaces on the airplane anymore.

Speaker:

but they used what they had available, which was their remaining

Speaker:

two engines, and got the airplane to an airport, which was huge.

Speaker:

you know, crash, fire, and rescue that's been trained and everything.

Speaker:

and so yeah, a bunch of people survived that when that sort of

Speaker:

crash is not something you might ever expect anybody to be able to survive,

Speaker:

when you literally have a yoke in front of you that does nothing.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

after that crash, the, the FAA went, "Hey, what did these guys do that made

Speaker:

this go as well as it did?" And one of the things that they discovered is that

Speaker:

United had been doing this crew resource management training for about 10 years

Speaker:

before that, and they had more of a culture of listening to the first officers

Speaker:

as opposed to-- Right, right, exactly.

Speaker:

and not anymore the old culture of what the captain says goes.

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Now it's biggest chicken wins.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Awesome.

Speaker:

All right, well let's dive into a, a couple of the things in air carrier

Speaker:

operations, and if you don't touch on one or two of 'em, I might bring 'em up

Speaker:

'cause I'm, I'm pretty interested myself

Speaker:

Okay.

Speaker:

I guess I'll start, and this is not necessarily part of the course, but,

Speaker:

just from my own experience, I, I wanna talk about what's different about

Speaker:

air carrier operations, and this'll touch on operational control, which

Speaker:

is one of the, items here that's on the, the list of required things.

Speaker:

for an air carrier operation, and this can be Part 121 airline, this can be,

Speaker:

Part 135 charter, you know, anybody who's required to have a certificate.

Speaker:

In fact, I would actually lump the 91K operators in there, the NetJets and stuff.

Speaker:

Even though it's technically Part 91, it is a lot more regulated

Speaker:

than the rest of Part 91.

Speaker:

but any air carrier in those groups is gonna have what are called

Speaker:

operational specifications, ops specs, which is basically a list

Speaker:

of what they are allowed to do.

Speaker:

and sometimes those things even allow you to, I don't necessarily

Speaker:

wanna say violate the regulations.

Speaker:

It, it basically gives you relief from some regulations.

Speaker:

for example, one ops spec that it's possible to get in Part 135 is, normally

Speaker:

any IFR flight with passengers under Part 135 has to have two pilots.

Speaker:

But there is one ops spec that's available that allows you to

Speaker:

use a three-axis autopilot in lieu of the second crew member.

Speaker:

some carriers have that, some don't.

Speaker:

so every carrier's going to have certain ops specs, that allow them to do what

Speaker:

they wanna do, and those all have to be approved and signed off by the FAA.

Speaker:

and the FAA, of course, has criteria that have to be met

Speaker:

before those get signed off.

Speaker:

the other thing that all, all air carriers are gonna have is either, an

Speaker:

FOM, flight operations manual, or a GOM, which is a general operations manual.

Speaker:

They're essentially the same thing.

Speaker:

the ops specs and the regulations are what you have to do.

Speaker:

the GOM or the FOM is going to be how you comply with all of those things.

Speaker:

Hmm.

Speaker:

So lots of standard operating procedures and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker:

So every air carrier is going to have that level of structure to their flying.

Speaker:

And it really does help safety.

Speaker:

You know, it's one of those things that until you've kind of been in

Speaker:

the system, it seems like, well, this is, you know, this is unnecessary.

Speaker:

This doesn't sound like fun anymore or that kind of stuff.

Speaker:

But it really does improve safety, especially, you know,

Speaker:

the larger carrier you get to.

Speaker:

You know, if you're flying at a major airline, you are never,

Speaker:

ever flying with the same people.

Speaker:

You know, you're going to be with a crew for one, you know, one

Speaker:

four-day trip or something like that.

Speaker:

And then you'll probably never see them again.

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker:

And so everybody has to do everything the exact same way so that there

Speaker:

are no surprises because some of the crashes they talked about in this

Speaker:

ATP-CTP course and, you know, just that crash we were talking about just now.

Speaker:

You know, we are at takeoff.

Speaker:

That's non-standard phraseology.

Speaker:

Shouldn't happen because it allows there to be the potential of miscommunication.

Speaker:

And so that structure is really what's common to all air carriers.

Speaker:

So now that I have that out of the way, a lot of these things that

Speaker:

they put under the heading of air carrier operations are really more

Speaker:

about, you know, jet operations and, you know, turbine operations,

Speaker:

high altitude operations still.

Speaker:

So physiology is the first one on the list.

Speaker:

You know, a lot of that is oxygen deprivation type stuff.

Speaker:

There are some other things that they deal with, but that's probably the

Speaker:

consciousness,

Speaker:

one.

Speaker:

Yes.

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

The higher up you are, the shorter that time period is.

Speaker:

I will recommend here several years ago, maybe even a decade ago now,

Speaker:

I went down to FAA headquarters in Oklahoma City and I did the oxygen

Speaker:

chamber training that they have.

Speaker:

And it was fantastic.

Speaker:

You

Speaker:

know, you get to experience hypoxia for yourself and everybody

Speaker:

experiences it differently.

Speaker:

And so that training is all about just recognizing what

Speaker:

your particular symptoms are.

Speaker:

They have a bunch of training videos that they go through there as well.

Speaker:

One of which is they… So the, the chamber training they do, they only

Speaker:

take you up to 25,000 feet at most.

Speaker:

they don't need to be doing things like knocking you out or anything like

Speaker:

that for you to, to get the experience.

Speaker:

But they do show some videos of people, you know, they showed an

Speaker:

old video of an airline captain, essentially being, at 35,000 feet.

Speaker:

again, this was in a chamber, so he wasn't really up in the sky,

Speaker:

but they had him at that pressure.

Speaker:

And yeah, it was four or five seconds, and he was useless.

Speaker:

so I'd, I'd definitely recommend that as, as something that people should

Speaker:

consider going and doing if, if you have the ability to, to take a few

Speaker:

days and, and travel to Oklahoma City.

Speaker:

The training itself was only one day.

Speaker:

but it does start right away in the morning, so you need

Speaker:

to get there the day before.

Speaker:

And you can't fly for 24 hours after you're done, so you

Speaker:

need to stay for another day.

Speaker:

Well, it's something that any pilot can go and do for free.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

you know, obviously you'll have travel costs to get there, but, they

Speaker:

don't charge anything for the course.

Speaker:

you just have to get on the list, which is not always easy, but

Speaker:

it's absolutely well worth it.

Speaker:

you know, if you're a CFI, go and take your students with you.

Speaker:

it was, it was well worth it

Speaker:

Well, I have a question for you, in that, category of air carrier operations.

Speaker:

we s- several episodes ago did, did an episode on checklists, for

Speaker:

Beyond the Checkride, and I know that checklist philosophy is, is

Speaker:

one of the areas that's covered.

Speaker:

any epiphanies or anything that you w- wanna bring up, or was it pretty much

Speaker:

everything we'd already talked about?

Speaker:

Well, I don't know how much we talked about in terms of checklist philosophy,

Speaker:

as it relates to multi-crew operations.

Speaker:

I think we were talking more about building your own checklists.

Speaker:

Yeah, and, and single pilot operations mostly.

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker:

So really, checklists philosophy comes down to how you use

Speaker:

checklists in a crew environment.

Speaker:

for example, always read the name of the checklist when

Speaker:

you're starting the checklist.

Speaker:

There are checklists that are similar, and once in a while… In

Speaker:

fact, my current employer, changed the name of some checklists because

Speaker:

they had, some checklists that had the same name, and you use them

Speaker:

at different points of the flight.

Speaker:

So transition altitude checklist, right?

Speaker:

Well, you use that going up and going down.

Speaker:

So now we have a transition altitude checklist, and we have

Speaker:

a transition level checklist.

Speaker:

Hmm.

Speaker:

You know, altitude is on the way up, level's on the way down

Speaker:

So yeah, you always wanna be reading the name of the checklist and make

Speaker:

sure that you're on the right one.

Speaker:

you always want to say, "Checklist complete" when you're done.

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

checklist complete." Great.

Speaker:

you do not want to stop-- or you don't wanna skip things

Speaker:

in the middle of a checklist.

Speaker:

If you need to stop a checklist for any reason, you know, if there's

Speaker:

some item you can't do yet, you stop

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

And then when you can complete the checklist, you continue

Speaker:

"Oh, we'll come back to this"?

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker:

And this applies to single engine piston operations.

Speaker:

I can tell you that we had a,

Speaker:

Yep

Speaker:

an incident in the flying club where somebody was flying the R182

Speaker:

And decided to do his before landing checklist early, and hey, nothing wrong

Speaker:

with getting things done early, right?

Speaker:

Staying ahead of the plane.

Speaker:

The problem was

Speaker:

Yeah,

Speaker:

at a point where he was going too fast to put the gear down.

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

And so he did the rest of the checklist and put it down.

Speaker:

And then, just due to some quirks of how the gear warning system works in

Speaker:

that plane and, and the techniques he was using for his approach and

Speaker:

landing, the gear warning system did not go off until he was in the flare

Speaker:

Mm.

Speaker:

'cause yeah, on the R182, if you're not at full flaps, the only other

Speaker:

trigger is that you're below 12 inches of manifold pressure, which

Speaker:

really doesn't happen until you're pulling the power out at landing

Speaker:

Well, it's an old airplane.

Speaker:

It doesn't say, "Gear up, gear up." It goes

Speaker:

And you might be expecting a beeper or a buzzer or something to go off when

Speaker:

you're landing for the stall, right?

Speaker:

Mm-hmm

Speaker:

And in the half a second or a second it took him to process that that was the gear

Speaker:

warning and not the stall warning that was going off, the prop hit the runway.

Speaker:

Hmm.

Speaker:

so that's when I learned that, is, you know, you don't keep

Speaker:

going with the checklist.

Speaker:

If you can't do all the things on the checklist, you just stop.

Speaker:

if there's something else on the checklist you wanna do, you can do it, but you

Speaker:

don't, you know, you don't actually continue reading the checklists, and you

Speaker:

definitely don't say, "Checklist complete

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker:

at a previous carrier, we've had a rule that you had to be physically holding

Speaker:

onto the checklist until it was done.

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

I like that.

Speaker:

I still do that now, you know

Speaker:

I, I, I teach that actually.

Speaker:

single pilot operations is obviously what I'm teaching and, it's a little

Speaker:

bit different than, you know, a, a crewed environment, so you have to do

Speaker:

your own checks and balances, right?

Speaker:

so

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

that's one of them

Speaker:

Well, and something that might, work well for, single pilots, I like to,

Speaker:

when I'm creating a checklist, like we talked about in that previous episode,

Speaker:

I like to have something somehow that's unique to that checklist.

Speaker:

And that way, if I am wondering, "Oh, did I complete that checklist?" I have one

Speaker:

thing I can look at and I can, you know, it'll be a switch or something like that,

Speaker:

and I can say, "Okay, if that switch is not on, I didn't finish that checklist."

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

Yep

Speaker:

it's a lot easier when you have two crew and you can go to the other

Speaker:

guy, "Hey, did we do that checklist?"

Speaker:

It's a tr- it's a

Speaker:

and then, you know,

Speaker:

in that case, yeah

Speaker:

right, right.

Speaker:

But if there's, you know, sometimes even if you did, you just go,

Speaker:

"I'm not sure we did that on this leg. Let's just do it again."

Speaker:

I'm doing it again.

Speaker:

Yep,

Speaker:

No, no harm in that

Speaker:

I, I also teach to, to do a flow and then check your flow with the

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

That

Speaker:

Checklist should be a checklist, not a do list

Speaker:

Exactly.

Speaker:

Exactly.

Speaker:

Yep

Speaker:

Cool.

Speaker:

Well, that's good stuff.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

w- another thing I'm curious about, is ground operations.

Speaker:

what was talked about in ground operations?

Speaker:

I guess in performance they talked about VMCG, which is your minimum

Speaker:

directional control speed on the ground.

Speaker:

if you've ever wondered why, on some of the bigger jets they push the power

Speaker:

halfway up and then sit there and wait for a second and then push it the rest

Speaker:

of the way up, that's because the engines are gonna spool up at different speeds,

Speaker:

and it's possible if you just took the throttles and shoved them all the way from

Speaker:

idle to full, that one engine would spool up a bunch more than the other and then

Speaker:

the airplane would turn on the ground.

Speaker:

you know, your nose wheel would just go skidding sideways.

Speaker:

And so they push it to 50%, wait for the engines to spool up, so

Speaker:

that when they push it the rest of the way, they should be synced

Speaker:

up enough to, to maintain control

Speaker:

you don't end up with significantly different

Speaker:

differential thrust or something?

Speaker:

Hmm,

Speaker:

Right

Speaker:

Well, anything else in the air carrier operations, a list of topics that stand

Speaker:

out to you that you wanna talk about?

Speaker:

Or should we move on to the fun stuff, the sim?

Speaker:

Well, let's talk for a little bit about the automation, navigation,

Speaker:

and flight path warning systems.

Speaker:

again, you know, there are plenty of 172s out there that have, you

Speaker:

know, G1000 and have all kinds of bells and whistles that, you know, we

Speaker:

didn't necessarily have in the past.

Speaker:

you know, really advanced autopilots.

Speaker:

Uh, but airline operations, you're

Speaker:

gonna have a pretty advanced autopilot.

Speaker:

You're gonna have things like EGPWS that aren't going to be on a small airplane.

Speaker:

TCAS, that's not gonna be on a small airplane.

Speaker:

So they, they went through things like, um, you know… Well, and this, this

Speaker:

is partially in the sim as well, but So the, the EGPWS that I mentioned a

Speaker:

second ago, that's E-G-P-W-S, Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System.

Speaker:

So when that goes off, there is an escape maneuver that you execute

Speaker:

immediately, no questions asked, because you don't wanna go splat.

Speaker:

and they, they talked at length about American Flight 965 in Cali, Colombia.

Speaker:

This was back in about 1995.

Speaker:

I believe it was a 757 on approach in a country that, you know…

Speaker:

And this is before GPS even.

Speaker:

they were on an NDB approach, and there was some confusion about where

Speaker:

exactly they were because, apparently there were multiple NDBs in various

Speaker:

points of the world that had the same identifier as the one that they needed.

Speaker:

And there was, I forget exactly what it was.

Speaker:

There was something about their database, and how they were trying

Speaker:

to program this stuff into their flight management system, where it

Speaker:

completely screwed up their navigation.

Speaker:

And so they ended up, in the process of trying to fix this, pointed at

Speaker:

a mountain and eventually got the, ground proximity warning system,

Speaker:

and they tried to climb out of it.

Speaker:

but unfortunately, they still had their air brakes on because they

Speaker:

were trying to come down initially.

Speaker:

and it sounds like that if they had not had their air brakes

Speaker:

out, they might have made it.

Speaker:

They might have been able to out-climb that mountain.

Speaker:

But unfortunately, they crashed, and all but four people on the plane were killed.

Speaker:

So, you know, big, big accident for American.

Speaker:

And of course, that captain that was our instructor remembered it vividly.

Speaker:

so yeah, they talked a lot about, navigation in situations like that where

Speaker:

you don't have the latest and greatest.

Speaker:

you know, ways that even your latest and greatest stuff can mess you up.

Speaker:

So important stuff to learn

Speaker:

Well, let's talk about the sim, and my first question for you

Speaker:

is how was that UPRT training?

Speaker:

What was that like in the sim?

Speaker:

Well, that was maybe the most interesting part of the sim training.

Speaker:

I would think so

Speaker:

I ended up in the Airbus A320 sim, which in itself was interesting.

Speaker:

You know, it is not, You know, like I said, there's no checkride for

Speaker:

this, and so it doesn't really matter what aircraft type you end up in.

Speaker:

there is a minimum weight that the aircraft, you know, minimum

Speaker:

weight of the aircraft that the simulator is supposed to be for.

Speaker:

you know, I know some people have gotten the 737 as well, and, and

Speaker:

that seems to be roughly the class of aircraft that the, ATP/CTP courses

Speaker:

go for is the, you know, the A320 or 737, you know, mid-size airline jet.

Speaker:

but yeah, the A320 of course is a highly automated, some may

Speaker:

say over-automated airplane.

Speaker:

and it's a little bit weird to fly because of that.

Speaker:

so it was, it was interesting getting into that, and I would not

Speaker:

say I necessarily know anything about how the Airbus itself works.

Speaker:

But, yeah, I, I actually managed to

Speaker:

I wouldn't say crashed the sim in the airplane sense, but I would say

Speaker:

I crashed the sim in the IT sense, um, on one of the recoveries because

Speaker:

it just stopped and said, "Please call the sim maintenance people."

Speaker:

And then we had about an hour break while they put it back to

Speaker:

a, a state where it'd work again.

Speaker:

Kent, you're always breaking stuff

Speaker:

I am.

Speaker:

I mean, that's what, that's what IT guys do, right?

Speaker:

We break it and then we reboot it.

Speaker:

But so what happened, you, you have to recover from increasingly

Speaker:

unusual attitudes, and this was the weirdest one where you're

Speaker:

starting partially upside down.

Speaker:

You're at 120 degrees of bank, and you have to recover.

Speaker:

So, you know, I was in 120-degree left bank, so what do I do?

Speaker:

Move the stick to the right.

Speaker:

Well, airplane starts rolling back to towards level, and I neutralize the

Speaker:

stick, and it just keeps rolling, and I start going to the left with the stick,

Speaker:

and it just keeps rolling to the right.

Speaker:

Didn't seem like I had any control of it whatsoever.

Speaker:

And when it got to about 120 degrees to the right, then it finally

Speaker:

started rolling back toward level, and it just, it had this repeated

Speaker:

oscillation between about 120-degree left bank and 120-degree right bank.

Speaker:

so when I started

Speaker:

altitude, speed,

Speaker:

I have a theory, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Speaker:

Okay.

Speaker:

so at first, like I said, I was, I was putting the stick toward where

Speaker:

it needed to go for level flight, and then when it got to level, I

Speaker:

was, you know, tr- neutralizing, and then when it went to the other side,

Speaker:

then I would go opposite the roll.

Speaker:

Eventually, I went, "Okay, this thing isn't recovering that way, so I need to

Speaker:

get farther ahead of it." And so then when I got to one side, let's say to

Speaker:

the left, I would actually… Well, so as soon as it started rolling to the

Speaker:

right, even though I was already at 120-degree left bank, I went full left

Speaker:

stick, and it would still bank all the way through level back to the other side.

Speaker:

And so as far ahead of it as I could get, I still never got control of it.

Speaker:

now I'd be interested in hearing from any Airbus pilots out there if this

Speaker:

was just a quirk of how the Airbus flight control system works or, you

Speaker:

know, what their theory might be.

Speaker:

If I were to say, you know, if this were to have happened in a 737 or something

Speaker:

else that doesn't have the, the crazy fly-by-wire system that, Airbus has, where

Speaker:

the computer is, a higher priority than the pilot, I might have thought, "Okay,

Speaker:

maybe what's happening is that by putting in that, left aileron input or whatever-"

Speaker:

my right aileron is going down and potentially becoming stalled, and that's

Speaker:

why it's going the other way on me.

Speaker:

that's really the only theory I had that, made any aerodynamic sense.

Speaker:

Right

Speaker:

but yeah, like I said, the, the Airbus flight control system is another

Speaker:

variable that I just don't know enough about to be able to say, "Well,

Speaker:

here's what was actually happening." But yeah, after several oscillations

Speaker:

both directions to upside down like that, yeah, the sim just went,

Speaker:

"Uh-uh, we're not doing this anymore."

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

it was, it had to be pretty fun though, right?

Speaker:

It was a pretty fun

Speaker:

Oh yeah,

Speaker:

do UPRT in a big jet like that.

Speaker:

Yeah, for sure

Speaker:

So, what else about the Sim stood out to you?

Speaker:

Well, with, with the Airbus, a lot of it was just how automated everything was.

Speaker:

you know, you pretty much, there's a, a certain detent

Speaker:

that you went to on takeoff.

Speaker:

It's the, the second one from all the way forward.

Speaker:

it's called flex.

Speaker:

and you push the throttles into that for takeoff, and I believe we

Speaker:

pulled them back, or maybe we didn't.

Speaker:

we may have pulled them back one detent into climb and then just left it there.

Speaker:

But really, the, the auto throttles do everything.

Speaker:

and so you don't touch the throttles again until it's time to chop 'em at landing.

Speaker:

so that was, that was a little bit weird.

Speaker:

But, you know, then getting into this Airbus thing where it's just

Speaker:

like you don't touch anything until you're about to land, that

Speaker:

was, that was a little bit weird.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Hmm

Speaker:

Interesting.

Speaker:

Yeah, that hands-off, flying though in certain circumstances is what

Speaker:

gets pilots into trouble, to get you into an unusual attitude or

Speaker:

a, a stall or something like that.

Speaker:

So, yeah, interesting.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

So, remind me, was it six hours of sim?

Speaker:

10 hours total of sim.

Speaker:

hours of SIM, that's right.

Speaker:

So yeah, six hours of stall and upset recovery, icing and

Speaker:

thunderstorms, and then four hours of navigation and automation

Speaker:

Y- and your sim training, was that 10 hours, you know, five in each seat

Speaker:

Yes.

Speaker:

Yep

Speaker:

role?

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Okay.

Speaker:

All right

Speaker:

so you basically both go through everything in the left seat, but

Speaker:

you have a sim partner as well.

Speaker:

So, you know, if it says two hours of training on something,

Speaker:

you're doing one hour in the left seat, one hour in the right seat

Speaker:

All right, cool.

Speaker:

So, Tell me, you know, something you did in the sim, that you, besides

Speaker:

that, 120-degree bank, that is something that you just wouldn't be

Speaker:

able to do, in a, in a real aircraft.

Speaker:

I think you did some, some stall recoveries or something like that, right?

Speaker:

Yeah, we talked about the, the high altitude stall recovery

Speaker:

a little bit earlier and,

Speaker:

Yeah

Speaker:

can't power out of it, so that was one thing.

Speaker:

And you could do that in an airplane.

Speaker:

There's, there's a lot of sky up there.

Speaker:

You would just have to get a, a clearance to do it.

Speaker:

But, you know, jets are expensive, and so, most people aren't gonna pay you to do a

Speaker:

stall recovery at altitude so that kind of stuff is always gonna be done in the sim.

Speaker:

But then the stuff that really has to be done in the sim, you know, they had, the

Speaker:

ground proximity escape maneuver and,

Speaker:

Mm-hmm

Speaker:

wind shear escape maneuvers and stuff like that.

Speaker:

and of course then, you know, there are plenty of other things that are not really

Speaker:

in the ATP CTP course that are more in the type rating course that would be things

Speaker:

that you don't really do in an airplane, like cutting your engine at V1 and, and

Speaker:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker:

all that sort of thing, so

Speaker:

There's some value to training in airplanes, but you can do a lot

Speaker:

of things in a sim that you would never do in an actual airplane

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

Well, you know, overall, let's take it a little higher level.

Speaker:

know, as we talked about earlier, this started with the, that Colgan Air crash.

Speaker:

In your opinion, after having gone through it, do you think the ATP/CTP makes

Speaker:

airline and business aviation safer, or is this more of a compliance exercise?

Speaker:

Well, I think some of it depends on whether you get a good instructor, and I

Speaker:

was lucky enough to get a good instructor.

Speaker:

I'm, I'm glad I got a good instructor rather than someone who just

Speaker:

clicked play on YouTube videos.

Speaker:

And don't get me wrong, we watched plenty of videos.

Speaker:

There, there's, there's actually some good stuff out there.

Speaker:

in fact, I kind of was trying to take notes as to what some of the videos

Speaker:

were that we saw, and they used stuff that was on, you know, Nat Geo TV.

Speaker:

they actually even had-- Well, they had Captain Joe on YouTube, and Bold Method,

Speaker:

and, Smithsonian Channel, Mentor Pilot.

Speaker:

you know, so they used videos from a, a number of different sources.

Speaker:

All right.

Speaker:

Well, cool.

Speaker:

so then you, you feel like there's, as long as you get the right instructor, you

Speaker:

feel like there's good value there, huh?

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

And, you know, it, it depends on you as well.

Speaker:

You know, if you go into it with the attitude of, "Well, this is just a

Speaker:

box to check and this whole thing is stupid, and it's Congress's fault

Speaker:

we have to do this", you're not necessarily gonna get anything out of it.

Speaker:

you know, you really do have to think about all these accidents

Speaker:

that they're telling you about and how it relates to your own flying.

Speaker:

and that's where having worn that director of safety hat, I think,

Speaker:

helped me out a fair bit as well, because in the course of, doing that

Speaker:

job, I kind of figured out that, you know, everything is human factors.

Speaker:

and it's real easy to read an NTSB report or watch a video about an airline

Speaker:

crash and say, "That's just stupid.

Speaker:

I would never do that."

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker:

I can tell you, not a single one of those pilots went to work that day and said,

Speaker:

"I'm gonna crash an airplane. I'm gonna do something dumb and crash an airplane."

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

Yep

Speaker:

you know, one of the quotes that I just saw you highlighting there, and

Speaker:

this, this came from Captain Sigmund, who taught that class, the, He said,

Speaker:

"You never know on which flight your career will be judged So are you gonna

Speaker:

be Sully or are you gonna be somebody who made a stupid mistake and crashed?

Speaker:

and that's all up to

Speaker:

How you operate every day.

Speaker:

It's about attitude.

Speaker:

Just showing up for this class with the right attitude, it's kind of like showing

Speaker:

up to fly with the right attitude as well.

Speaker:

what can I learn from it?

Speaker:

Not, "Oh, geez, I have to check this box." but one of the things that I, I kind of

Speaker:

learned as a director of safety is that the NTSB kind of stops short of the true

Speaker:

cause of an accident in a lot of cases.

Speaker:

sometimes they catch it, but there are an awful lot of accidents where it's

Speaker:

just blamed on pilot error, right?

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

But when you start doing root cause analysis, it's more, you know,

Speaker:

you, you keep asking why until you get to the end of the line.

Speaker:

And so it's-- you have to ask, "Okay, why did that pilot make that error?

Speaker:

Was it because they had a bad attitude that day because of something else

Speaker:

that was going on in their life?

Speaker:

was it because they weren't properly trained?

Speaker:

was it because there was a conflict between the two crew members or a

Speaker:

communication issue or something like that?" so you really have to come at

Speaker:

every flight and every training event with the right attitude and, and see what

Speaker:

you can get from it as opposed to just, "Well, I'm just gonna get through this

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

A of it has to do with what's going on in between the pilot's ears, right?

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

the headwor- the

Speaker:

The most unreliable part of any airplane is the nut between the yoke and the seat

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

Excellent.

Speaker:

All right, well, one last question for you.

Speaker:

Overall, know, take a, a young 200-hour pilot, what would you want him or her

Speaker:

to know what's coming up in their, later in their career about ATP, CTP?

Speaker:

Is there something in general or some concepts that, you know, you wish

Speaker:

you had known when you were younger that had you in the right direction?

Speaker:

I would say that one of the most important things is that, you know, yeah, you

Speaker:

might be just working on your private, you might be a CFI who's bouncing around

Speaker:

the pattern in the right seat of a 172,

Speaker:

but your attitude and the way you do things matters.

Speaker:

You're developing habits that entire time.

Speaker:

Do the right thing.

Speaker:

You can't say, "Well, this is good enough for a 172.

Speaker:

I don't need to worry about being any better than this yet." you know, having

Speaker:

good checklist discipline, sticking to your SOPs, learning your flows and

Speaker:

your memory items, all that stuff, as well as just the, the attitude that

Speaker:

you bring into the cockpit every day, all of that matters because, like I

Speaker:

said, you're developing habits, and it'll be easier for you in the future

Speaker:

if you do the right things right now

Speaker:

I love that.

Speaker:

I love that.

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker:

Always be thinking that you're building the foundation for the future, and

Speaker:

okay is not good enough when we're talking about something with these

Speaker:

ki- types of consequences, right?

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

And, you know, I'm not saying you can't have fun.

Speaker:

Far from it.

Speaker:

But if you're gonna have fun, A, you still wanna be safe when you're having fun.

Speaker:

But think about the kind of fun you really wanna have.

Speaker:

There are so many things that are fun in aviation.

Speaker:

You don't need to go and bust a whole bunch of regulations, you know.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Let's say you think it's gonna be fun to go and buzz your buddy's house.

Speaker:

Well, a lot of people crash and die doing that.

Speaker:

there's-- Things are very, very different when you're close to the ground, and the

Speaker:

FAA doesn't require you to be trained on those things because they don't want

Speaker:

you doing that stuff in the first place.

Speaker:

so always think about what the consequences are for whatever action

Speaker:

you happen to take, because if you're gonna be doing this for a career, you can

Speaker:

derail your career long before it ever gets started if you do the wrong things

Speaker:

I

Speaker:

think about what you're doing.

Speaker:

Think about, okay, if I'm gonna do X, Y, or Z fun thing that I wanna do, fun

Speaker:

doesn't necessarily mean risky, but a lot of things that are fun are risky.

Speaker:

So consider what you might not know.

Speaker:

Consider how, you know, consider what extra risks you are taking

Speaker:

on, how to mitigate those risks.

Speaker:

There are ways to have fun safely.

Speaker:

so I don't want people to think I'm, I'm just a, you know, square fly in

Speaker:

the box kinda person all the time.

Speaker:

I like to have fun as well, but you gotta have fun the right ways to

Speaker:

keep yourself safe, to keep yourself within the regulations, because having

Speaker:

an accident or a violation on your record is gonna make things so much

Speaker:

more difficult for you in the future

Speaker:

right, Kent.

Speaker:

Well, thanks for taking us through this.

Speaker:

that was really cool to get that inside look.

Speaker:

I wanna stress that AT-CTP is not just a study course for a written

Speaker:

exam, it's training, simulator time.

Speaker:

you- you're really getting into things that hopefully will save

Speaker:

lives and hopefully have saved lives.

Speaker:

I agree with you.

Speaker:

I think it can be really fun to f- to fly precisely, develop and follow SOPs.

Speaker:

I, I couldn't agree with you more.

Speaker:

There's, there's fun in that challenge, right?

Speaker:

and, there's also fun types of flying we can do where we can get special training.

Speaker:

I just-- I didn't

Speaker:

Yeah

Speaker:

Kent.

Speaker:

I just, landed an airplane for the f- first time on water a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker:

And

Speaker:

Awesome

Speaker:

in, in the right situation and, with the right training, you know, the right

Speaker:

person there kinda guiding you, we push those corners of the envelope like we've

Speaker:

talked about before, one corner at a time, and that's really, really fun.

Speaker:

Lots of fun to be had, without taking risks that aren't necessary.

Speaker:

So I like that.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

You know, if you wanna turn an airplane upside down, it's a whole lot more

Speaker:

fun if you do it in an airplane that's meant to be turned upside down.

Speaker:

you know, flying an Extra that's got a roll rate of 400 degrees per second and

Speaker:

turning that upside down is gonna be way more fun than trying to turn over a

Speaker:

trainer Cessna or Piper, and you won't have to live with the guilt of, you know,

Speaker:

you performed aerobatic maneuvers in this airplane, and then the wings fell off and

Speaker:

you killed a couple people by accident.

Speaker:

Yep

Speaker:

So yeah, go turn an airplane upside down.

Speaker:

Just do it at the right time and place and in the right airplane.

Speaker:

like I said, there's a, there's a ton of fun to be had out

Speaker:

there, as you just found out.

Speaker:

The, the seaplanes are an awful lot of fun as well

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker:

so, so yeah, I, I couldn't agree more.

Speaker:

There's consequences that we're doing, and, you know, taking

Speaker:

it seriously is important.

Speaker:

every pilot who goes through this ATP CTP, and there's a lot, you know, carries

Speaker:

with them the learnings of and thousands of people who died to give us lessons,

Speaker:

so it's important to take it seriously.

Speaker:

All right, so if today's episode got you thinking or got you fired up, or you've

Speaker:

got, ideas that are different from ours, or you've been through ATP/CTP yourself

Speaker:

and you wanna share your story, reach out.

Speaker:

Leave us a voicemail.

Speaker:

as I explained on the last episode, if you go to the Contact Us page on the

Speaker:

website, there's a new way to contact us.

Speaker:

there's a RadioCheck link there where you can leave up to 90 seconds.

Speaker:

make it pithy, make it interesting, and maybe it'll end up on a future podcast.

Speaker:

but yeah, take a look at, ways to contact us there.

Speaker:

We wanna hear about it.

Speaker:

That's one of the reasons we're here.

Speaker:

Now, Bill,

Speaker:

gonna say something, Kent?

Speaker:

last, last thing before we go, I think we need to leave that quote that I have

Speaker:

highlighted right now as our parting line

Speaker:

All right

Speaker:

I, it was, it was, funny and useful.

Speaker:

but one of the things that this retired captain said to us was, "When the FAA

Speaker:

invites you to a barbecue, you'd better be sure that you're not the pig."

Speaker:

I love it.

Speaker:

All right, so that's it everybody.

Speaker:

wanna leave you with, the fact that, you know, physics are unforgiving, so

Speaker:

it's best to know everything you can.

Speaker:

So we're still flying, we're still learning, and we're

Speaker:

trying not to be the pig

All Episodes Previous Episode

About the Podcast

Show artwork for The Student Pilot Cast
The Student Pilot Cast
Fly. Learn. Repeat. A Podcast about learning to fly.

Listen for free

About your host

Profile picture for Bill Williams

Bill Williams

Bill is a papa, a pilot, a geek, a diver, a sailor, a motorcycle rider, and a podcaster. He brings a long if sometimes interrupted history with both aviation and podcasting, along with passion for both to his podcasts. Currently working on his CFI, Bill is dedicated to advancing his skills and sharing his love of flying with others.

Bill hosts the popular Student Pilot Cast where he shares his flight training with the world, bringing the listener into the cockpit and more frighteningly, into his head, to share in the triumphs and the defeats of perpetually learning the art and science of flying.

More recently Bill is also co-hosting the Flight Line Podcast with Tiffany Wolf as they reunite after having been co-hosts on the reborn Pilotcast podcast in the earlier days of aviation podcasting.