January 2008 Feature Story:
New Hire

Story by First Officer Able

The Saab behaved beautifully all the way down the localizer and we broke out of the clouds at minimums, seconds before touchdown. I moved the power levers into beta range and the deceleration pinned me to the harness as the airplane soon came to a stop.

“Don’t forget to fast for your medical tomorrow,” said Bill, the simulator instructor.

A week later, the call finally came.

After clearing the six-hour “astronaut medical”, a captain’s board and a government background check, the airline offered me a job as a first officer on an Embraer regional jet. Words can hardly describe the feeling of having achieved a boyhood dream, something that I hadn’t ever thought possible until a year ago. I headed to the airline’s home base to begin six weeks of training.

Preliminary Training and Indoc.
Indoctrination training involves company history, rules and regulations, and general subjects such as payroll, benefits, simulator training slots, and cockpit resource management (CRM). The hardest part of this phase of training was to remain awake in spite of our instructor’s best efforts to jazz up the material. Week two marked the beginning of our systems phase, which lasted a little over three weeks. For eight hours a day, we dissected the systems of the Embraer 145 and spent much of our nights in study groups, poring through the pages of our manuals. Our instructor was excellent and while I became overwhelmed with some of the material early on, I soon got in the groove of training and made it through the oral quite easily. The fact that the check airman played with a knife during the oral did help keep my answers on the straight and narrow…

The last two weeks of training were spent in the simulator, trying to learn to fly the darn airplane while every possible emergency was thrown at us. With some help from my fantastic simulator partner, a transitioning Saab captain, I passed the checkride and was unceremoniously ushered to Initial Operating Experience, during which a new hire flies with a seasoned captain who serves as an instructor to ensure a safe transition from the simulator to the line. The experience was exhilarating, but more on that later.

Meeting the airplane
“No one should be sweating at five in the morning,” I thought, waiting for the shuttle outside the hotel. It might have been the incredibly muggy Texas morning, or probably just nerves — perhaps both. On this memorable morning in May, for the first time and after six weeks trying to learn all about it, I'd meet the Embraer 145 I’d fly for the next few years.

The uniform blazer felt too heavy for this weather and my hat was bothering me as beads of sweat collected underneath it. Plus the hat made my already oversized head look far too big. The luggage and heavy flight kit I had to drag along with me were also growing increasingly bothersome. Damn Texas weather, I cursed. To my utter dismay, it was just as muggy and oppressive inside the terminal and while I desperately needed the caffeine I had no choice but to jettison my barely touched cup of steaming coffee.

A half hour before the flight, the captain finally showed up and unceremoniously introduced himself. Minutes later, I performed the walk-around. It felt strange. I’d never flown on an Embraer before, not even seen one up close, and while I had dissected the aircraft’s innards in great detail during my oral just a few days ago, the beast seemed like a complete stranger to me. While excited to fly it, I felt no connection whatsoever with the airplane.

Checklists were run, paperwork completed, and we were soon under way, finding our way through the maze that is our major hub home base. I fell behind from the get-go. They teach you a lot of useful things in training: how to fly single engine, what to do if you encounter a microburst or severe windshear, how to diagnose and deal with all those unnerving chimes and flashing red and orange lights when events just conspire to make your day a headache. What they don’t teach you though, is how to handle the extremely busy ground portion of a flight. Of course, the captain was just one piece of a well-orchestrated ballet of gate agents, flight attendants and rampers. I, on the other hand, felt no wiser than anyone sitting in the back.

My PAs (passenger announcements) were horrible and, most likely, left the passengers wondering why on earth the pilot sounded so nervous. I snapped out of it, however, as we lined up with the runway.

“Your aircraft,” the captain called out.

Back in familiar territory, I squeezed the brakes with my toes, grabbed the yoke and positioned my slightly sweaty left palm on the throttles. “Cleared for take-off, lights are on, before take-off checklist is complete,” said the captain. For the first time that day, I smiled.

The smile grew bigger as the N1 increased and the engine slowly spooled up to produce 7,000 lbs. of thrust with that incredible sound that only a jet could produce. “Set thrust,” I called out, prompting the captain to check that all engine parameters were in the green.

“Thrust set… 80 knots… V1… rotate,” he called out.

In spite of the sticky heat, the aircraft lifted off with graceful ease. In awe, I might have forgotten a call-out or two. But the captain patiently went about his non-flying pilot duties, letting me enjoy a feeling that will forever live up there with that of my first solo. The first leg was short and jet speed made it all a blur. My descent planning was far from stellar and the captain gave me room to mess it up. Even the controller seemed in on it as she gave us a series of vectors to widen my pattern and allow for more room to descend. With guidance from the left seat, I touched down in Shreveport and was completely elated.

Later that day, our itinerary took us to Mexico on a long, almost three-hour leg, which the captain flew. The last flight of the day, back to homebase, would be mine. Minutes after take-off a triple chime and the red Master Warning snapped me from my reverie. I called for the emergency procedures checklist, which the captain promptly ran through. We agreed that the warning was most likely due to a sensor problem and elected to continue on home. I was impressed that the captain would seek my opinion on the matter since I had only a handful of hours in the aircraft, but I now realize that being fresh out of the schoolhouse makes you valuable to another pilot who has been out of training for a while.

On the way back to Dallas, the captain left the cockpit a few times. Flying the jet alone was absolutely exhilarating… until Center directed us to cross a fix at a certain altitude and airspeed. After punching in the parameters into the Flight Management System, I chopped the throttles and started down, monitoring the vertical speed required to meet the crossing restriction. As we got closer to the fix, the vertical speed (descent rate) required to arrive at the fix at the right altitude began to increase. With nobody to confer with, I stared blankly at the arrival plate, trying to crunch numbers in my head the old-fashioned way. It became obvious that 2,500 feet per minute down at this point would not work. I deployed the speed brakes and threw down 9 degrees of flaps to keep the speed in check as I increased our descent rate to almost 4,000 feet per minute, feeling horrible for the poor passengers in the back who had no idea they were guinea pigs. I crossed the fix at the assigned altitude and speed in just the nick of time. When the captain re-entered the cockpit, I was short of breath and a little frazzled. He just smiled.

“I wondered when you’d put out the boards,” he laughed, referring to the speed brakes. “They always descend us late on this arrival.”

A horribly botched landing later, we were back at the gate and done for the day.

My first day at an airline had been everything I’d imagined and more: humbling, stressful, intimidating and most of all a whole lot of fun.

Ed. Note: First Officer Able is the “nom de plum” of a new contributor to America’s Flyways. He is new to the airline business having recently been hired by a major carrier. We welcome him to these pages and look forward to learning more about the life of a new hire.