PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Sad story about a high and mighty check airman
Old 29th Mar 2012, 08:19
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Prince Rupert
 
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: BC
Age: 64
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There are many such sorry characters abound. In another life with a major pacific rim carrier, I was forced to undergo a right hand seat simulator training in preparation to fly a a co pilot due to an impending strike by the locals. A very experienced Asian expat was on the left seat and in a simulated rejected takeoff whereby he had to take over from me and execute the maneuver; in a flash he correctedly accomplished the reject maneuver but I wasn't sure if I had accidently induced an abrupt movement during the handing over of controls which caused the simulator to lose control loading causing us to lose control going off the runway. The captain on the left told the Alteon checker that we had loss of control loading, but the checker just kept remarking that we botched the maneuver! The captain then told the checker to give another rejected take off exercise where he would show that in a quick RTO action, sometimes the sim just lost control loading.

After some argument and after the sim engineers had resetted the machine, the checker reluctantly gave another rejected takeoff which I had to conduct from the RHS. The captain told me to slam the thrust levers back abruptly, pull the speed brakes abruptly and pull the reversers with great force. True enough we lost control loading again. I couldn't believe my ears at what the checker said; he told us we were too rough on the controls and should execute the RTO gently and smoothly. I have alway approach RTO exercises aggressively where every nano seconds count. There were some grudging debriefing points after the session where upon the captain commented that the checker should be aware of such simulator phenomenon. The checker maintained that he never had such a situation before in a check and maintained that it was all our fault. The captain wasn't happy, taking the checker's assessment under protest.

Sometime later I had some recurrent traning with the same checker; he remembered the incident very well and kept on bad mouthing the captain. I even learned that he had even urged his fellow checkers to teach the captain "slitty eye smart alec" a good lesson. I then learned that the loss of face thingy did not apply to Asians but to Westerners too. Suffice to say I lost any enthusiasm to extend my contract when another opening came along.

We all try to hide the shameful stuff from getting to the open but this thread might just be the kind that opened a whole vat of worms, inconvenient truths that somehow needed to be addressed at one time or another.
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