I was contacted by Chuck directly and invited to interview. After that, it took a couple of phone calls and e-mails among the various HR folks to ensure that I got a plane ticket and all the required forms to fill out prior to the interview.
Upon my arrival in LGA, I headed straight to the Marine Air Terminal via the Route A bus. Flight Safety is located directly in front of the bus stop and across the street from the main Marine Air Terminal. It's easy to see.
The first part of the process is turning in your paperwork. The e-mail you will receive before the interview will contain this sentence: "Please note: Our protocol requires the interview team to cease the process if the requested information is not presented and complete at the start of the interview process, so please check and double check your work." The reason they want your paperwork complete and in the correct order is because they have a lot of people's paperwork to go through that day and they don't want to spend time searching through your packet of stuff looking for a specific form. Also, they ask you to only paperclip your information together. This is so that if it s in the wrong order, they won t have to take out staples to fix it. It isn t impossible, just fill everything out and follow the checklist.
The next part is the Written Test. They will tell you that it is based on the ATP written , and that is true, but not the entire ATP written. There are ZERO questions that reference any figures. There is one question about the proper entry to a holding pattern, but it starts, An aircraft is inbound to a VOR on the 020 Radial and is told to hold So you have to do a little math to get your inbound heading to the VOR.
Sheppard Air knows that interview written tests don t usually involve certain subjects and has a database of questions that includes only interview test questions. It costs $39 and is worth every penny. When you get the Sheppard Air software, you can ignore any questions about supplemental air carriers. That takes out a large percentage of the 807 questions. Go through the rest of the questions a few times and you should be good. Most of the questions focus on FAR s and Weather. Let me repeat this one more time: Get the Sheppard Air interview software.
After the written test there is a logbook review. They ll ask you to tab all your checkrides so they can look at them. There was a form that the reviewer had to fill out with the dates of all your checkrides. They also needed to know the date of your last flight as well as your total time in the past six months and last 12 months; so have that information readily available. Be prepared to talk about any failures.
For me, those two things happened on day 1. Some people went on and did their HR interview on day 1, and some went all the way into the sim on day 1. They had a serious interest in moving people through as expeditiously as possible.
The HR interview was relatively simple. For some it was a captain and Chuck and for others it was a captain and the head recruiter. There weren t any technical questions to speak of, and the HR type questions were what anyone would expect. Like I ve said, they were interested in making a yea/nay decision and getting you out of the room. They had a lot of interviews to do.
Assuming you made it through the previous steps, the last part was in the simulator. Depending on the location of your interview, it will be in different airplanes. Mine was in a Beech 1900D sim.
There were two key things they were looking for in the sim, (1) Do you have a decent instrument scan? and (2) Do you know your basic IFR procedures well enough to do them under time pressure? These two things show that you can be trained to fly a new airplane with a reasonable amount of practice.
They gave us a sheet in the morning to study with power settings, call outs, and a basic format for what we were going to be doing. It also had the DP and approach plate attached. They took some time to explain exactly what we were going to be doing and gave us some tips. Pay attention when they do this. They re giving you helpful information. There are, however, some things they won t tell you.
The take off will involve some sort of DP. Study it before you get in the sim, know it before you get in the sim, and brief it when you get in the sim. Also before takeoff, make sure your sim partner knows exactly what you want him to do throughout the whole ride. Your partner will be helping you by moving heading bugs and course needles, calling out altitudes and airspeeds, and flying the plane when you re briefing the hold and approach. He won t be allowed to call anything out to you or do anything for you unless you specifically ask him to.
In our situation, the departure was off of LGA, and the hold was over the LGA VOR (it s on the airfield).
No matter what the situation is, they won t let you get more than four miles or so from the VOR after takeoff before they tell you to turn back direct to the VOR and give you your holding instructions. Have your partner copy and read back your holding instructions and start the turn toward the VOR. While in the turn, your best bet is to look at the RMI and be able to decide the proper entry for the hold before you even roll out of the turn. While you re turning, the radial you re on is going to change, so be able to adjust for that. Study the thumb method and be able to do it with an RMI while turning. It isn t hard once you figure it out. Once your partner is done copying/reading back, you can hand the controls to him, make a decision on what your entry is going to be, give a quick briefing on what you re going to do when you hit the VOR, and take the controls back. If you did it all right, you can take the controls back and have a full mile left before you hit the VOR. You will definitely have to fly the entry.
Now it s time for the ILS. The approach in our case started 10 miles from the airport. Since we finished the hold over the VOR, I assumed we would have a 10 mile long downwind leg to set up and brief the approach. I was wrong. The evaluator moved the airplane in the sim (without telling us) to a point much closer to the initial fix that was 10 miles out. We were given short downwind and base vectors which made for about three miles to hand off the controls, brief the approach, and take the controls back before being told to intercept the localizer.
I watched four different sim sessions (I only flew one of them) and every single person got a bad vector onto the final. It was very easy to blow through the localizer. Here s the deal: the person operating the sim is a pilot and a job interviewer, not a trained air traffic controller. You will probably get a tight, bad vector; deal with it. It s relatively simple once you get on the approach. Fly it down to minimums, either they ll freeze the sim or give you the option to land it.
The keys to doing well in the sim are:
(1) Slow the plane down. There s no reason to go blasting around that close to the airport. They ll give you a speed range to use during cruise flight. Stay at the bottom of it.
(2) Know your hold entries. If you have to get a piece of paper and draw it, you re wasting time.
(3) Like everything else in this interview process, it happens quickly and you don t have very long to make an impression. They have less than ten minutes to evaluate you and get the next person in the seat. Be prepared to work hard for those ten minutes.
They don t expect you to be perfect during the sim. If you bust an altitude, say correcting and do something about it. They want to see that you can generally stay ahead of the airplane and at least know where you re supposed to be at all times.
After the sim, it was time to get finger printed and drug tested. That s the easiest part of the whole thing.
Good Luck. |
