It is not as much teaching you how to operate the 767 in regular line operations as it is a rehearsal for a play to be presented to an individual that will criticize you on wether your response to the PM calling "minimums" for a circling approach was "continue" or "check" to the play critic that will be of the outmost importance instead of your deviation from speed or altitude, the understanding of that philosophy early in the training seems to be the difference between the people that cruise through it and those that need to be placed on suicide watch.
We get very little factual information from the training center as to why individuals did not make it, the stories that we do get have taken a life of their own and seem to be different from actual occurrences 10 fold, the only thing that we know for sure in the case of the DEC in recent times that made it all the way to the company check before the JCAB check just to be let go at the end is that we for sure do not know what happen, if it was just an unceremonious way of playing politics just to be cruel or they keep trying to pump money to salvage quarter of a million dollar investment of a trained pilot, we will never know because the training center managements doesn't let us in their decision making process. One thing I do know, bs spreads very easily out here on the line and when it does get to you, is nowhere near the bulls original droppings.
M
I'll try to post what I believe is the key to a successful training here at AJX's one big happy family.
1) "Calls and SOP's"
This is where the majority of your concentration at the early stages of training should be placed, you MUST learn all calls (and we have a very chatty cockpit here) and sing them out at the correct time during the very scripted sim session as if it was second nature, don't worry if you blow through your altitude by 150 feet or if you can't keep the speed within 10 knots, if you make your required calls you will be OK, I just cannot stress this enough, they know that they will give you (if I may use a Texas unit of measurement here) a **** load of sim sessions to get your hand flying under control so they are not worried, but if you are still struggling by sim 6 with the calls and SOP's, even if you are the best damn hand flyer on the planet, they will interpret that as that you don't care too much about learning it the ANA way, you need to sit in the CBT at the training center with your partner and do some chair flying and get familiar with all our calls or nothing else matters, if you think that many of our calls are over kill or you know of a more efficient way from a previous life or you might have a sincere suggestion to make things better, KEEP IT TO YOURSELF
2) Follow the script
Repeat after me, "It is a rehearsal" not a sim session, you will be given a training manual that has all the lessons on it and you will know what malfunction will come and when during the lesson it will come, be prepared for it, tab your QRH in the checklists you will need for that lesson and only take the approaches that you will need for that lesson, you will know what ILS, VOR or NDB approach you will shoot so the time to take them out of the binder is before you enter the sim, not when the PF calls to prepare for the approach, they view you going through a binder looking for a plate or fumbling trough the QRH looking for the appropriate check list as you not beeing organized and prepared, you have a script in fron of you, take it with you to the sim and while there are a few seconds of inactivity for the PM while you are waiting to intercept the inbound course (there is a good minute or more that you are just sitting there as a PM) grab your QRH and flip it to the next checklist you will use, is on the script, you already know which one it is, grab the next approach plate and have it on the top so that the observer ( the play critic) interprete this as you are studying hard and that you are prepared for the lesson, make notes on your plate, sim profile for the day to remind you of the calls and timing of the calls, highlight frequencies and altitudes, on the plates and use them as a reminder of the timing you need to make calls, highliting stuff means you are studying
they LOVE IT.
3) Learn the SIMISMS
The sofwere on our sims have some bad habits that are not on the actual airplanes and they will come out at the worst times during a sim session, one of the things is that when you divert back to the origin airport (and you will know when that will happen, it is on the script) and you select the approach to be conducted, the normal operator will look on the last pages for the RWY center line intercept, bring it to the first legs page top, make the inbound course bib and execute, right? Fat dumb and happy! Well, the FMS's on the sim will give you a string of discontinuities that will take you more than a few attempts to get rid off, all while the play observer is sitting there thinking, "This guy doesn't know how to use the FMS" but nobody tells you the FMS has that glitch nor they tell you how to fix it, they expect you to figure this on your own but the correct time is NOT in front of your sim instructor because he is not really an instructor, he is a critic, there is no instruction here, there is criticism of you performance.
The best way to bypass this glitch is before you select the approach, go to the last fix on the legs and bring it to the top of the first leg, in effect erasing all the other points on the legs and just leaving the last fix on the first legs page and execute, then you can go to the DEP/ARR page and select the approach and extend the center line as you normaly would, this prevents the discontinuities and will save you from being perceived as not understanding the FMS, this believe it or not has been the undoing of many people here. Also the set up of the NDB approach the way they want it to be set up is a little conversome and it does take some practice so the time to do it is not with your instructor in the sim because there isn't one, there is a critic there that will interprete this as you being fumbling through it. I have the solution for that too, there is a contraption on the training center called "the FMS trainer" the best way I found to be proficient at setting this approaches in a short period of time was to go on my day off, start up the thing and just set the approaches (both the ILS and NDB) over and over again including the technique described above to prevent the discontinuities, I did it over and over again until it just took me a few seconds
to set up even the conversome NDB approach, the FMS trainer has a schedule on that room so if there is nobody scheduled to use it, just go in a learn how to bypass these SIMISMS quickly.
4) How to deal with your critics job?
As I said before there is very little in terms of instruction here, there is observation of your performance and criticicim afterwards, take notes to everything they say and if you disagree or agree with what is being said you will still agree in the group setting, during a normal sim session there will be 4 people there and during progress checks up to 6 , including you and your sim partner, after the briefing is complete, if you have a question or a disagreement or need clarification on anything, take your sim instructor apart of the group, and one on one you can ask, then you inform your sim partner of the correct information, also during progress checks you will be criticized for something that was opposite to what your instructor was teaching you, DO NOT, bring it up during the debrief, just nod and write it down, then take your instructor a side and bring up the discrepancy, him and the progress checker both have ANA badges with low employee numbers on them so they can sort it out without your help.
These are some of the gotchas that I have seen and heard people fall into from guys that went trough training and from some of the company RTC's I hope you find it useful.