Sim Day 4

So… today was a pretty hard day in the SIM. In the first flight I felt like I really let my captain down as I missed a few calls and somehow ended up buggering up the GPS during the missed approach. He became very frustrated and we really broke down our CRM and the instructor turned that into a teaching moment having me go incapacitated so he had to finish the flight on his own.

In the break, I started talking with the instructor about my concerns of the training and shared with him my struggles with the SOPs and my frustrations that I wasn’t feeling up to the task to accomplish the levels he expected. The instructor said we’ll discuss further after the flight.

So we climbed back in the SIM and I could tell my captain was still seething with frustration so I just decided to do everything I could to fly my flight. Today we were experiencing icing conditions so we had to follow all the procedures and carefully watch the plane for signs of icing. In the climb out, I successfully identified a pitot static failure in my instruments and passed the controls to the captain who still had his instruments on the autopilot. Once out of the icing, I took back the controls and we were presented with an explosive decompression so I followed the procedure and flew the profile pretty well. I did struggle a bit getting the autopilot sorted out for the descent but eventually got it set and flew the rest of the maneuver without issue.

I then flew the rest of the arrival and approach on autopilot and then transitioned to a LOC only approach so we could do a standard controlled descent. Again we setup the autopilot and flew the profile however I was pretty dependent on the captain for the use of the autopilot.

While flying the landing, I was told that there was a runway incursion and I executed a missed approach and in the missed I was given and engine fire and failure which was pretty challenging but I was able to fly it successfully and then few a single engine ILS approach and yet another missed approach, which on single engine is pretty tricky.

In the missed, I make sure to get vectors so we didn’t have to fly the entire published missed approach. I then flew around and completed a single engine approach and landing which went pretty well and I landed successfully.

After the flight we started the brief and discussed our concerns about the training and our struggles with the SOPs and wether or not we could be ready for the checkride. The instructor made a comment that he thought the captain would be ready but that he felt I plateaued today – despite me feeling pretty good about the maneuvers and procedures that I had previously seen.

Decided it would be best to call the Cariboo chief pilot so we get her on the line and the instructor shared his insight and then I was able to speak to her. She was very good about reassuring me that what I was experiencing was normal and that she was sorry they didn’t get us more SOP training durin ground school – apparently Cariboo line pilots get 3 full days in SOP drills in the hangers so they can nail the profiles even before getting to SIM. No wonder we were struggling so bad!  We were 3 days behind before we ever started!

After some reassuring words and some helpful tips, we wrapped up the call and made the decision to continue training tomorrow and we’ll just do our best with the SOPs and we’ll continue to have the captain assist me as I learn and nail the procedures.

So… hopefully tomorrow goes better!