Hi all,
I've had my assessment this Thursday (May 24) and successfully passed. I will post a breakdown of my assessment process.
Dates:
Initial application: March 16
Application incomplete e-mail: April 19 (missing docs added April 20)
Application complete: April 23
Phone call e-mail: May 3
Phone call itself: May 7
Assessment day: May 24
Positive e-mail: May 25
I have stayed at the Premier Inn, it's a very nice hotel with a big comfy bed and just a 10-minute walk from the Ryanair building.
I went to Upilot on a 3-hour session the day before my assessment, and I have found it to be very good preparation - the guy is very nice and helpful, and will show you almost everything you need to know and which parts you need to prepare a bit better for the assessment day.
We came to the Ryanair building at about 7:50am, and we were greeted in the lobby by an older captain, who was our assessor for the day along with another captain. He showed us around a bit, made jokes with us constantly and all in all was a helpful and charming guy. There were 8 of us up for assessment.
As usual we had a briefing about the sim and the whole process. After that we were paired up for the sim (quite randomly, no apparent criteria for it) and were given our charts for the day (Liverpool). We were given about 20-30 minutes to brief with our partners for the sim session.
My partner and me were the first in the simulator. We did the WAL2T SID (amended to 5000 ft) and the ILS 27 approach in Liverpool. I was PM first. First we did some accelerations, climbs, descents and turns and then we had a toilet fire as an emergency. We declared Mayday, decided to return to Liverpool and request vectors for ILS 27 (always try to make it easier for yourself!), but the ATC radar was down so we had to do the full procedure. During the holding we were asked to accelerate and climb back to 5000 feet because of another aircraft in distress, but instead requested to make an immediate approach from the holding which was granted. So we did a quick briefing for the approach, intercepted the ILS from the base turn and landed successfully.
When I was the PF, it was almost the same but without an emergency, instead of that we were asked to point our location on the ILS chart, and were repositioned to intercept the localizer and shoot the approach.
Both me and my partner weren't very happy with how we did in the sim, because our MCC communication could have been better, and I was occasionally struggling to keep some speeds and altitudes while flying, and I was oscillating left and right a bit when intercepting the localizer, though I managed to stabilize myself on the approach eventually and make a decent landing.
Our assessor was helpful in the sim, often told us what we needed to be more careful with, and what to do differently. Remember, you control the speed with your thrust setting, and the rate of climb/descent with pitch on approach. In a prop I was taught the opposite and because of that was struggling a bit but got the hang of it eventually.
Many people here say that CRM is the thing the sim part is all about, but while it obviously is important, they do want to see how you fly the damn thing as well.
After the sim, we had the interview. It was quite simple and a nice chat. The HR questions came first, and were mostly standard. After that I was asked by our assessor why he didn't see good communication on the sim. I answered new partner, new aircraft and short time for briefing because we went in first. He told me then we should have asked for more time to brief the whole flight, and not rush it, and said it was a good learning experience nevertheless. Rest of the tech questions were pretty much the usual, nothing you can't already find on here. Some things about my MEIR aircraft (DA42) and the 737 (number of seats, generators). Just be yourself, answer honestly, study the tech questions well and you shouldn't have problems on the interview.
Anyway, after I left the building I wasn't very happy with my performance in the sim, and thought I was likely to fail because of it. But the next morning I was hit with the good news - safe to say it made my (and my family's) day
