First sim of my Command course sitting in the briefing room ( Monarch Luton ) with Chief Training Captain and another upgrade candidate, maybe both a little apprehensive. Halfway through the brief, a knock on the door and one of the Sim Engineers pops his head around the door and says 'hi, should you actually be here ?'. After some scratching of heads and checking rosters we phoned the crewing training desk to be told that the times were good but the venue had been changed to LGW some weeks previously !
Exit stage left, back to hotel to pick up bags, drive down M1/M25 to LGW and straight into the box. CTC says right, I'll pop you on the end of the runway and for the rest of the session we will just tootle around getting used to the left seat, no assessments, no checking and we will start to catch up tomorrow. We both passed our Command course on time !
Most of the Sim instructors/examiners I encountered were good, some very good and the odd one or two exceptional. One thing that concerned me a little towards the end was that the majority of examiners had never done any training in a relevant aircraft other than checking on the jump seat. They had never done any asymmetric work in anything bigger than a Seneca; not their fault of course, its how these things are done these days but we now have a generation of line pilots and training captains who have no real non-normal experience in the aircraft they fly or instruct/examine upon. Just sayin'.............