ATIS:
I wonder what airplane type you're coming off, as this could have some bearing on the workload you'd have in the course.
If you have some experience with an FMS or FMGC, it would greatly ease the task, like about 30% I would guess.There may well be FMS trainers available on the internet.
I have had several candidates who came off either the 737 or back from the -400 ( after it was removed from our crewbase) and the difference in their experiences with the conversion course is telling:
the -400 pilots thought the Airbus had some great features, like the aforementioned GSmini,but the biggest thrill for them was how quiet the cockpit was in cruise. Admittedly, we usually cruise at M.81-.83, whereas the -400 does .85-86, and it has a standing shockwave on the fuselage top at the point of its largest cross-section, which happens to be the cockpit. And the cockpit windows,especially the side windows, are very,very close to one's ear. They were, to a man, noticeably hard of hearing, and had been wearing active-noise-cancelling, circumaural headsets on the -400.
They couldn't believe that we could shed our tiny earmoulds in cruise, and just use the speakers, and turned way down at that.
the pilots off the 737,some with over twenty straight years on it, were easy to recognize: they had the classic, 1000-yard stare, as if they were in shell-shock by the time they got to me. Hands-and-feet skills: excellent, they sure could drive. Automation, heavy-duty programming and flight managing was another world to them and they struggled to keep their heads above water while "drinking from the proverbial firehose". When they were on course, there was no extra sim practice time available for the rest of us: they were in there every minute they could wrangle- silent hours, weekends, whatever it took.
And it worked. A methodical, building-block approach to the automation greatly smoothed the transition. One's first exposure to the FMS and EFIS actually comes just sitting in a classroom in front of two screens with a MCDU keyboard, there's nothing else to distract or keep an eye on. And the screens will simulate an entire fllight, over and over and over.
Learning the acronyms almost demands its own course, and it reaches it crescendo in the Flight Controls chapter.
I was trying to get some laughs from my course colleagues by describing how all I could manage during my first, full-flight sim was try to decide how fast I was going, then try to figure out how fast I was supposed to be going quickly enough to not forget how fast I was going...well, you get the idea.
Surprizingly, someone in the group topped me by not understanding ANYTHING on his PFD, but he didn't want his instructor to know, so he faced the PFD but actually flew the first four hours just looking out the corner of his eyes at the old-fashioned, comfortably-steam-driven standby instruments!
I hope I haven't scared you, that was not my intent. When the airplane isn't doing what you want, for whatever reason, just disconnect everything and handfly it while your erstwhile colleage reprograms the damn thing and then plug the autopilot and autothrottles back in, if you want.
And when you're uncomfortable with the fly-by-wire progressively failing from full envelope protection, through the various partial-protection modes, to no-protection, to ( gasp) direct law-wherein, when you move the sidestick, the control surfaces actually move as much as YOU want- remember, that's the mode that all airliners were flown in for decades before the new Airbuses came along. You're not in any greater peril than they were.
Let me be the first to welcome you to the world of magenta coffins, fuzzy dice, hooks and hockey sticks, iron crosses, donuts, cobwebs, Beta bars, tombstones, thridle opdes, alpha floors,yo-yo's,birds and moustaches, managed and selected alpha locks, constraints( in three colours),rose nav,trend arrows,alpha-prot,memos,TOGA,1+F,and switches that work in reverse on the upper panel!
you'll never say blue or red again; it will be cyan and magenta from here on.....