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Today was more or less like yesterday, except that we departed Seattle for Salt Lake City, and how shocking, we diverted to PDX for holding practice, VNAV approaches and a few ILS-GS OUT’S and a Category 2 and 1 approach.
What was interesting about today is that we had a different instructor. But the new instructor came with another instructor who was checking the other one out on the 767. So not only were we being evaluated, our instructor doing the evaluation was being evaluated by another instructor because he was new.
The FTD instructor was a Delta pilot who retired, went to work for MaxJet, discovered “Man, this uhh, kinda stinks!” and then came back to work for DGS (Delta Global Staffing?) as a 767 instructor. Previous to retirement he was a 777 captain.
I had a better feel for the aircraft today as I finally learned to relax a little and understand how simpler, but different the maneuvers are in the 757/767. It took some getting used to but sitting down with the books, listening to a little “Yo Yo Ma” in the training center brought everything together and I think I kicked some ass today.
Yesterday, I did pretty well, but I felt like I was about 5 miles behind the airplane so I didn’t really get a ‘warm fuzzy’ with my performance. But today I performed well, was able to have good situational awareness and was able to backup the captain very well during his legs flying with no cajoling from the FTD instructor.
Tomorrow is a checkride called a “Procedures Evaluation” where they evaluate just what we’ve been doing in the flight training device all week. After this “PV” (as they call it), I’ll graduate onto full flight simulator training and actually start the meat and potatoes of qualification training.
Lots more hand-flying, engine failures, distractions and yes, another evaluation.
I went out and had dinner and a beer with the captain, traded some stories, laughed about the experience we’ve had so far and are both positive we’ll do well during tomorrow’s evaluation.
The captain is a former USN S-3 “Viking” pilot. For some strange reason, most of the guys I make “fast friends” with in the airline business are usually Navy guys. Strange. Perhaps the Navy method of “The book doesn’t say you CAN’T do it” rather than other branches of the military that say “The book doesn’t say you CANT do it” is more compatible with my technique. I don’t know! 
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Hey Doug,
Comment by Scott Fitzpatrick 04.17.07 @ 6:55 pmGlad to hear that you are making your way thru 76 school with all the style and form that an ex-1900 driver would show! I am former Navy (enlisted SENSO) and seems that Delta has quite a few former Navy guys there. I run into one all the time in LGA thats a former A-6 pilot and a 76 driver at JFK. He commutes to ORF on my outfit (Colgan) quite a bit. By the way, do they let you guys hand-fly NDB approaches in training? I like using the HSI CDI and RMI needle trick on the EHSI on the Beech. Although, I’ve not done an NDB approach “for real” on the line. Alot of LOC 31 LGA approaches though! Especially on the high-wind days we’ve been having this year.