G-IV Type Rating, Day 21
It’s mid-afternoon on The Day After, and I’m sitting in my suite looking at a coffee table. There’s nothing on it. Likewise, the bed, floor, nightstands, granite counter tops — come to think of it, the entire hotel room — sits completely devoid of the books, class notes, reference manuals, fold-out diagrams, flow charts, cheat sheets, and Post-It notes which have polluted the joint for more than three weeks. Lord knows how the housekeeping staff managed to clean anything with so much detritus scattered all over the place, but they did it. And now it’s all gone. In it’s place rests a single 4-inch square piece of paper, a Temporary Airman Certificate. It’s exactly the same as the old one with the exception of six...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 20
The end is in sight! It feels like I’ve been living in this Marriott for a month. It’s a nice place. I’ve got probably five hundred feet of space in this suite. They even do the dishes for me. Still, after shuttling between Simuflite and the hotel non-stop for so long, I’m looking forward to saying goodbye to the persistently hot, humid, and windy metroplex that is Dallas. Day two of our checkride prep was very encouraging. Only made one major mistake, setting up the aircraft for a full rated power takeoff when I was asked to select reduced, or “flex”, power departure. The flex power takeoffs make a V1 cut much easier to handle. Unlike every other multi-engine airplane I’ve flown, power available after an engine...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 19
This 21-day program is rapidly coming (careening?) to a close. As it does so, the teaching stops and the testing begins. The Big One, the checkride, is in two days. To prepare for it, the schedule calls for a two-day dress rehearsal which ideally gives us a chance to see what the checkride will look like, and ensures our instructor that we are ready to undergo the examination. We had another new guy with us in the sim today. I’ve officially lost count of how many instructors we’ve had since day one. Our class must have seen at least 10 of them, all told. The day began with a three hour mock oral exam. The instructor didn’t mess around — there was no introduction, no “Hi, my name is…”, no nothing. He literally walked...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 18
This was our finest day of (fake) flying yet. The difference? A new instructor we were assigned — a former military pilot named Norm. Easygoing, friendly, and truly interested in teaching, Norm was a pleasure to work with. He shared his knowledge about the airplane and wasn’t just checking off boxes on a form. A pleasant demeanor does wonders for the learning environment. It creates an atmosphere where students are not afraid to ask questions or seek clarification when necessary. With other instructors, I might just let a question go because of the manner in which it is likely to be answered. With an instructor like Norm, however, you can be assured before the issue is even raised that it will be addressed as a conversation among professional...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 16-17
I don’t know who that guy flailing around aimlessly in the cockpit yesterday was, but I’m happy to report someone better showed up today. There are a few reasons for the improvement. First of all, the sim sessions aren’t evenly split between the two pilots. Whoever starts off in the left seat tends to get more time there. I’d say it ends up being about a 60/40 split. Eventually it all evens out because the person starting out in that seat alternates from day to day. Yesterday it was my sim partner who got more time there, today it was me. Second, the instructor started us out with the engines running and all the pre-takeoff checklists completed. That provided at least another 25 minutes of breathing room. I flew seven approaches,...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 15
As Alec Baldwin famously said in the film State and Main: “So, that happened.” Yesterday I was feeling pretty good. Today? Not so much. People talk about how quickly and completely that giant video-game-on-steroids can humble even the best pilot, and I got a big fat taste of it this afternoon. The flight could be described as four hours of not being able to do anything right. I was behind the plane, exceeded the PTS standards, and generally couldn’t get my act together. I felt like Marty McFly hanging on to the back bumper of that car as he was towed around town. Except I’m not a kid hitching a ride on his skateboard, I’m a professional pilot who’s supposed to be in the driver’s seat. The sensation of hanging on to...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 13-14
Our class started out with five students (myself included), but now we’re down to four. It’s not what you’re thinking. Nobody’s dropped out, failed, or been asked to leave.. although that would certainly make for an interesting story. As with most things in aviation, reality is decidedly more mundane than you might expect if your frame of reference was a film or television show. What happened is that one of our classmates is chief pilot for a Fortune 500 company and his schedule didn’t permit him to take the full three week course all at once. He knew that going in, so the plan was always for him to finish at Simuflite’s Morristown, NJ location in a month or two with one of his company’s other pilots. I wish the guy...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 12
I’ve been getting quite a few e-mails from people about the type rating program. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to answer all of them, but I did want to comment on one particular message. A retired Delta 767 pilot e-mailed me recently to pass along a 2001 AVweb article he thought I’d find interesting. The piece was written by a long-time 747 captain named John Deakin who, after retiring from Japan Airlines, went through the Gulfstream IV type rating program here at Simuflite’s Dallas location. You can read the article for yourself if you like, but suffice it to say the author did not like the program at all and stated quite clearly that, in his opinion, he had not been properly trained. Deakin — who’s well known for...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 11
Steve and I managed to get three highly coveted hours in the Level D simulator today. The instructor gave us our first dose of system failures and malfunctions. If I recall the full list correctly, before we even took off we’d had a hot start, a start valve which wouldn’t close, an engine failure while starting, a right main boost pump failure, and a hung start. This was my first opportunity to taxi an aircraft with a nosewheel tiller, so I got some practice with that. I figured out how the thrust reversers work, and honed my technique on the ground spoiler check and takeoff briefing. We managed to get in three approaches, a hold, and Steve — who has a lot of experience on the Gulfstream — performed a short field takeoff and landing...
Read MoreG-IV Type Rating, Day 10
Today marked our last full day of ground school… and what a relief it was to reach that milestone! The morning was spent reviewing a few specific systems in detail. After lunch the instructor took turns calling each of us up to the front to teach one of the aircraft’s systems to the rest of the class. I’ve always said you don’t really know a subject until you have to teach it to someone else, and boy was I right. After each system was explained, the student/teacher would ask the rest of us various questions. Or we would ask him. I taught the ice & rain protection systems to the class and embarrassingly forgot what the SAT/TAS probe inlet looked like. Once that was done, we watched a 20 minute video on ILS-PRM (a system for...
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