The last two and a half weeks have been pretty busy. It has been 7 years since I did an initial aircraft course (MD-11 at World). The last one I did was mid-2000 in the Canadair Regional Jet when I upgraded to Captain at Comair. I already knew that airplane as I had been flying it as a First Officer for over 2 years already. So, if you toss that one out, I’ve done one in nearly a decade.
The good news is I made it to the end of the program without getting hurt too bad. Unfortunately, that wound up not being true for one of the guys in our class (a new-hire engineer). He wound up resigning yesterday after missing the passing mark on the written test by a couple questions. The first week he was sick but didn’t really say much about it, didn’t ask any questions, and didn’t absorb much of the material. By the time this week came around, it was too late to catch up, despite the long study sessions and help from, among others, myself and another engineer in the class who has been engineering on the DC-10 and KC-10 for about 15 years now, including a stint at World in the 80’s.
The schedule has changed lots of times. Maybe 4 or 5, I lost count. The current version (what I know of it anyway) is that I finished ground school yesterday. Today I’m going to Memphis (as I type this). Tomorrow morning, I’ll take the oral for the type rating with our designated examiner (it’s an FAA checkride, but we have our own DE, which is nice). Tomorrow evening (assuming that goes okay), I’ll go home. I go back to Memphis to start simulator training on the 29th (I think). That will run roughly through the middle of March and end with the completion of the checkride (the simulator part of it) that I’ll start (with the oral) tomorrow.
After that, and yet to be scheduled (but likely after a week or so off), I’ll go back to Atlanta for a day or two (or three?) of ground school covering long range navigation and differences (i.e. between the various DC-10’s in our fleet). Then I’ll go back to Memphis for a couple of simulator sessions. After that, I go out for OE (generally called IOE – Initial Operating Experience by most everyone else in the industry). No idea when that’ll start, end, or how long it’ll go. World tends to give their first-time upgrading Captains lots of OE so it could drag on for a couple months.
So far I’m feeling pretty good about things. I did well on the written. Some of the ‘pilot’ kinds of things (flight guidance, autopilot, autothrottles, etc.) that we covered this past week really helped me gain a better grasp of how this thing is actually flown. I wish that had happened up front, but the way we did it gave the engineers more time to absorb their stuff, which is arguably more complicated and labor intensive anyway.
All the training didn’t stop me from a diversion or two, though. I went out for jazz three times in the last two weeks. The only Atlanta-area jazz I had previously been to was at Dante’s in Buckhead. This time I made it to Churchill Grounds downtown and an Ethiopian restaurant (Queen of Sheba) that has a jazz jam north of downtown.
Prior to last week, I had eaten Ethiopian food once. It was with my brother and my parents when my brother was going to college in St. Louis. I think it’s a ‘collegie’ thing to try lots of different, well, things. Food, drinks, arts, habits, lifestyles, careers, majors, friends… but I digress. This was his big Ethiopian experiment and it wasn’t exactly a hit. At the time, though, I was probably unduly influenced by the opinions of my parents. I was also less appreciative of spicy foods back then, too. I wouldn’t rag on it as bad as my parents (still) would, but I don’t recall really liking it. I think it was kind of expensive, too.
This time was different. I’ve been all around the world and had lots of different kinds of food. I like most of it. Some of it I could live without. The place where the jazz was seemed reasonably authentic (as authentic as you’re likely to find in America, anyway), so I figured I should eat there, too. After the first time last week (a week and a half ago), I decided it’d be worth going back for seconds this week. I enjoyed both experiences. It was more food than I could eat. One dish wasn’t something I’d order again (though the sauce was fabulous), but the other was really nice. It was sauteed beef pieces with onions, peppers, and garlic and some sauce on the side, called Derek Tibs. It’s eaten in the ‘traditional’ Ethiopian style, which consists of tearing off their ‘bread’ (spongy, soft, sourish flat bread not much thicker than a tortilla) and using it to pick up the food with your hands.
The jazz was nice, too, though the ‘vibe’ was a bit restrained or conservative. This past Thursday I sat in, though, and on one of the tunes it seemed like they … how shall I put it… increased their emotional investment in the music a little bit. The trumpet player who hosts that gig, Philip Harper, plays quite well (he tours with the Jazz Messengers Reunion Band). There was sax player there who stuck out as quite good to me also. It was nice to get a chance to play a couple of tunes. I needed it, and I have a hunch I won’t be getting any in Memphis (… that’s chances to play music…)
Having recapped the events, there’s plenty of thoughts that go with it. That’ll come in another entry, though…
V-