Parc Aviation SSTR (merged)
I recently attended the Parc Aviation SSTR assessment in Dublin. The assessment is for the Boeing 737-3/4/500 type rating from which Parc say they have a 100% success rate of placing students with airlines. There is limited information regarding the number of courses they run a year and which airlines students are placed with. The cost for the assessment with Parc is £500, but you will need to spend two full days in Dublin. At the end of it you may, or may not be offered a place on the £18,500 TR course, but the selling point of the assessment is that even if you are not successful, you will receive feedback to help future assessments with airlines etc.
I searched high and low for information on this assessment prior to attending it and found very little, so I thought I would post my own experiences for those considering it. I do not comment on the implications of SSTRs, and I hope this post does not degenerate into the tired old SSTR debate.
I applied to Parc several months ago and I was contacted by them very shortly after filling out the application form. I paid up the £500 for the assessment and was given a date to fly to Dublin.
Several weeks after being given the assessment date by Parc, I was offered a job flying turboprops with a small European operator. I accepted the job of course. Having secured a job on turboprops I had no intention of paying for the Parc TR, but as I had paid for the assessment I thought I would attended it for my own information and hopefully learn more about my areas of weakness.
The assessment takes place at the Dublin Parc offices. On arrival at 0900 I was directed into a small room with 9 other candidates. There was no introduction or information given regarding the course and after a short wait it was in with the written tests. They consist of:
*40 min Verbal Reasoning test
*Un-timed Psychological test
*30 min Numerical Reasoning test
After the written tests are completed you are split into 2 groups. One group has their interview with the Psychologist and the other has the simulator assessment. I was to have the simulator assessment, but the sim slot wasn’t scheduled until 1900 and the written tests finish at 1200, so there was lots of time to kill. The assessment is conducted on a B737-200 sim and takes approximately 30 mins. Basic instrument flying skills are tested as well as PNF skills. The route is a SID out of Dublin, then RVs for ILS and it’s all flown raw data.
The following day I had my 30min interview with the Psychologist. Questions covered flying history, family, reason for wanting to do course etc.
Even though the assessment sounds quite substantial, it felt almost superficial. Except for the sim assessment, there seems little interest taken in candidates sitting the tests and getting information on the TR course was like getting blood from a stone. In addition to this I really think the assessment could easily be done in one day. I would say having it over two days has more to do with Parc saving money than anything else. Unfortunately it wasn’t a very positive experience and I learned very little from actually taking the tests, but I hoped the feedback would be revealing.
I received the feedback by mail about a week after doing the assessment. It consists of three pages.
The first page is an Assessment of Core Competencies which takes the result from all the written tests and compares yours to a set of norms. It really means nothing to anyone who doesn’t know how they have came to the adjusted scores. I couldn’t glean any useful information from this set of results. It seems the majority of competencies (almost all actually) are taken from the psychological test with the verbal reasoning and numerical tests counting for very little. There is no information provided regarding how well you did at the verbal or numerical tests. At the bottom is your overall score and the “minimum score required to be at airline standard”. As I said, I got no useful information from this page at all.
The second page is a written report from the psychologist. Mine was only several lines long and apart from some strange comments that contradict my working experience, it really said nothing at all. I was hoping for a lot more here.
The third page is the simulator assessment report. Most of which was taken up with flying details, licence number etc. At the bottom of the page was a two line comment from the assessing pilot and a score out of 10.
And that’s it! No letter, No thanks but no thanks and no guidance on what any of it means. It was all a bit disappointing and you are left wondering if you have been taken for a ride. Anyone thinking, as I was, that the feedback would reveal areas to improve on, think again.
Anyway, that was my experience with Parc. It may differ from other peoples, but I hope it gives anyone thinking of doing it a better idea of what to expect.