Chapter 46: Back to School

Orlando in mid-January was pretty chilly. I expected temps in the day between seventy and eighty. Instead, I got temps between fifty and seventy, with sixty being the norm for the week that we were there.

Bill, Sheila, Kim, and I flew in on the Challenger 350. Bill disappeared to visit friends. Sheila had arranged for some recurrent training in the plane, especially since she was about the become the chief pilot for the TNA jet.

Kim and I connected with David Serrow. We’d basically ‘bought him’ for the week, so we had a dedicated teacher for the two of us. He was eager to start, and Monday a.m. we talked about the reading we’d done and he tested our comprehension of the ‘prop-to-jet’ material.

David started us off talking about the aerodynamics of jet aircraft compared to propeller-driven aircraft. He spent some time on the dynamics of the swept wings as well as high speed handling. Basically, we’d be flying a rock with two engines strapped to it; without the engines and some directional control, we’d fall straight down.

We started on turbofan and turbojet operations next, and then broke for lunch. He kept lunch short, and then we were introduced to the sophisticated simulator. Kim and I were each given ground school assignments, while he spent an hour with each of us in the large device, that was pretty close to what our Challenger 350 was like in the cockpit.

We each got an hour of sim time, and that was even good for our logbooks. During the sim time, he had us doing many of the basic maneuvers we’d expect to perform in our plane, getting us used to the dynamics, turning radii, and so forth at different speeds. I knew the harder stuff was yet to come.

We were back in ground school at three p.m. and worked until six. We finished working through the jet engine dynamics, and started on hydraulics, electrical, and pressurization systems. At the end of the day, we went through the anti-ice and de-ice systems on the plane.

Kim and I felt like stuffed mushrooms as we went to dinner. David went off to be with his girlfriend, as he called his partner. We went back to the hotel, ate, read some junk stuff on the Internet, and went to bed. We were back for another dose early on Tuesday morning.

David started us out on the weight and balance calculations for jets, and in particular our Challenger. From there we moved into calculating takeoff and landing distances, and then learned about the V-speeds we needed to know: Vx, Vy, Va, V1, V2, V3, Vr, and so on for jets; there were over twenty of them.

The rest of the day, Kim and I each had two hours in the simulator, this time looking over each other’s shoulder as we flew in the left seat. Mostly, we spent the time learning ‘normal’ procedures. We received the school’s versions of the checklist for the Challenger, which were a little more thorough than those from Bombardier. David was a stickler for using checklists.

Late in the day, we studied high altitude operations, regulations, rules, separations, and jet-specific rules. The rest of the time we were looking over the other’s should at what was going on in the cockpit. The hours we’d spent in the jump seat of our own Challenger helped us quickly get a grasp on what was going on.

We ended the day, with him debriefing us about our simulator work, and then doing a summary of what he hoped we’d learned in ground school and our reading.

Each of our five days with David was like getting a drink from a firehose at full pressure. The more subjects we touched on, the less I seemed to know. Sure, I was learning a lot, but I was also becoming aware of the vast base of knowledge about jets and high altitude flying that I’d had all of but a vague notion.