One more myth of ryantology that I wish to dispel. There's a perception amongst fr pilots that they are seen by the wider aviation community as excellent 737 operators, evidenced by fr pilots success in securing jobs in the Middle East. I found out that this perception is entirely false.
The reason these pilots get jobs in the Middle East has nothing to do with their ability to fly the aircraft as close as possible to the ground for 45 minutes whilst discussing the blatantly obvious, it's because they know an fr pilot is the most unlikely to cause a fuss over t and c. You may not agree with that but it's fact. Yes you are well trained but step back and think about it for a second, you are well trained to handle a single failure in a certain manner. The sim instructor tells you in the brief to 'treat every scenario as real'. So there you are taking off out of xwz and the engine goes bang. You fly off to a hold and have a conversation about this for 45 min and check weather for a place you just left. Cabin crew only call you when called and are really calm and analytical. Passengers are silent and are only thinking about the inconvenience this will cause. All the while as close as possible to the ground. There's nothing real about that whatsoever.
Cast your minds back to the Hudson incident and BA in heathrow when the fuel allegedly froze (don't believe that for a second either). Hudson capt flew, did the radio, decided where they were going to land, all in an instant. Ba capt saw his co pilot was doing a good job and had the ingenious idea to raise flap and keep the 777 for landing on top of Slough. Did you know in fr we had an incident quite similar to these two?
An aircraft on approach in Rome encountered a very large flock of birds on approach and elected to go around. After taking multiple bird strikes both engines wound back to idle and the capt expertly put it on the runway. Aircraft written off. So sullenberger gets 50k per after dinner speech, burkhill goes on tv (then gets ridiculed by his colleagues who made him out to have bottled it when he clearly didn't) but guess what happened to our guy? They put a picture up in every crew room of a flock of birds and underneath told us that this was a 'murmuration'. After the taken off Google Attenborugh lecture they said (I still have it) if you see this on approach don't go around fly through it. At least I know now what to call a flock of starlings.
During a check for a job I'm sitting there with a quantas capt, ana capt, examiner from aviation authority and an American Airlines capt. So I pull out my fr handy dandy thing and proceed to read. 'Phones' I say. Silence. I say it again. 'Phones'. Japanese dude is asking me if I lost my phone. I point to my checklist. Aussie guy grabs it and is like holy sh/t look at this giving it to the American guy. Examiner is now all over it. I have four guys in the sim laughing their arses off. That night at dinner the Aussie says 'phones' and the whole table is going off.