The John Deakin article was excellent and a bloody frightening look at how Type rating schools shove a fire hose of info down everyone's throat and one up the other end too all in the name of a " lowest" set price and min time course.
That was written 10yrs ago, nothing has changed, gotten worse if anything as greed for profits and marketing shortest possible course times continues to climb.
Every other post above has restated nicely the same points on this subject that has been around for at least 30yrs since the early 80s when the new glass cockpits and fully automated airliners started to become more widely available and greed is good started to be the corporate way
Deakins was 120% right, students should be given reasonable time to absorb complex material and ask Q to ensure a more thorough understanding. Confidence in the newly acquired knowledge and skills in the sim should progress steadily or reasonably so as the course progresses to enable a basically escalating performance as time goes by.
Everyone learns at different rates and hits temporary learning plateaus, that is only natural.
Most of these ground schools whether on a bizjet or airliner should realistically be almost twice the length, ie maybe 3-4 wks instead of 2 ( in the GIV example given) to allow for the average spectrum of users. Not the uber hotshots who are brilliant in that time while everyone else is still miles behind the ground training or sim and completely overwhelmed.
Same with sim sessions, start off with the basic handling and procedures, manually flying and getting a feel for it all then move into more automatics usage, then emergencies etc
He was a veteran B747 Captain. How would an experienced GA light aircraft driver feel/cope, or a 0-200 hr space cadet??
A balance between cost and training time/content needs to be found as Wally said, sadly that balance has long since been completely lost by both airlines and the Type Rating schools like FSI and Simuflight.
Oh that's right all the real learning begins when you start airline line training or get back to your corporate flight dept right?
Of course now you are in a real aeroplane worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars with real pax down the back and out in the real world where there is no reset button.
Anybody here care to describe briefly what the training time vs amount and quality of material is like for anyone lucky enough to get hired at Qantas and Virgin that do their own in house ground and sim training??
Is it as bad as what Deakins described or more reasonably paced??