5 Steps to Crush Your Type Rating – (and any other training you do)

Hooray! You’ve been chosen! Your career and salary are on the way up.

Whether you’re new to the industry and still smell like the inside of a clapped out, cigarette stained Cessna 172, or you’ve been around a while, and know the bars in Shanghai like the back of your sun-spotted drinking hand, this fun-filled pathway to training Easy Street is for you!

How do I know?

I’m a 767 captain simulator instructor, and NRFO pilot. I’ve seen all sorts of pilots – young, old, bitter, happy, talented, and even some just regular folks like you and me.

Over the last couple years of flying the line and teaching in the simulator, I’ve noticed some specific behaviors pilots can do to ensure their success or cause their failure.

And like any good pilot, I can’t help but talk loudly at those who will listen about the incredible fact that I am a pilot and have some stuff to say.

There are five essential behaviors for passing checkrides.

In order to replicate the authentic airline pilot experience, I’m going to release this as an irregular update and in multiple parts so it has maximum confusion. Just kidding. It’s five parts and each one digs a little deeper.

First, a disclaimer! This is not official training information from any approved source, airline, the FAA, or any other organization who matters. These are the ramblings of a dude sitting in a chair drinking a coffee that may or may not have bourbon in it. His ex-girlfriend also repeatedly told him that he was an actual idiot, and by golly did she believe it, maybe you should too! These are just some musings, not gospel. Enjoy it for what it is. Disclaimer over.

Five Simple Steps to Crushing Your Type Rating – or any other training event.

STEP ONE: Right Time, Right Place, Right Uniform.

Show up 10 minutes early with note taking paper and pen in hand along with relevant questions about the material you will be covering that day.

What does this look like? This means you will need to know your meeting location and time. You must know if you require a badge or an access code, and how you will get where you are supposed to be. You should have reviewed the syllabus, studied the material, and jotted some notes about what you were unsure of.

Bring relevant questions. Questions show that you know you don’t know. Awareness of one’s ignorance is an excellent quality to have as a person, and an even better one to develop as a pilot.

From the bottom of my cold dark heart, I promise, a humble self awareness will save your life someday as you zoom around the sky in an aluminum missile whose wings are filled with dinosaur juice. You see, when an instructor knows that you know some stuff, but not all the stuff, the whole process of learning the stuff you need to know gets much easier.

Courageously resist your desperate urge to talk over the person who is answering your question.

This little nugget of wisdom is good as gold even in the real world. The briefing room is not like the breakfast table at the overnight where everyone talks over each other sharing stories, each one more full of complaints about scheduling than the previous.

We must speak one at a time, like the refined gentlemen and ladies we are. You spent all that time getting some good questions, you might as well get your money’s worth out of that windbag of an instructor sitting across from you.

Start strong. Don’t show up complaining, just show up. Right time, right place, right uniform is the strong start. This lets the instructor, check airmen, examiner, or whoever, know that you’re serious about your chosen vocation. (Read: this is a safe person that I can put my name behind and am not fearful of getting subpoenaed from their future fiery accident).

It’ll pave the way for a delightful event, and probably help you get the best performance from your instructor! Even if it doesn’t, who cares, you still did the right thing and that is what matters.

Pretty simple, right? Cool. Up next is step two!

Keep the blue side up!