My experience at DELTA's airline pilot ATP-CTP training.

during my ATP CTP class experience far in away the full motion simulator was by far the coolest thing the rest of the class was really great too so I thought I'd share here what happens at an ATP CTP class at Delta Airlines I won't go into all the requirements but if you want to fly transport category aircraft these days you have to take what's called an ATP CTP class taking and passing that class enables you to take the ATM the airline transport multi-engine written exam and after that then you're eligible to take the ATP check ride so being from the Atlanta area and with Delta Airlines being here in Atlanta it made a lot of sense for me to take a ATP CTP class here locally I'll go through each day and what we did but overall the people that I interfaced with the three different instructors I had the people that were in the class it was fantastic it was really cool for somebody like me coming from a you know a single engine background to learn about the transport category and what does that mean what does it mean to fly Jets all right so let's go three each to the days day one was about air carrier operations and what does that mean in the life of a airline pilot we hit topics like physiology uh Fitness for flight the different types of health issues or hazards that um airline pilots need to be aware of there was a big emphasis on high altitude operations and oxygen requirements and of course we talked about fatigue and what does it mean to be a commuting pilot commuting to you're base in another city and the effect that might have on you and what are the regulations around something like commuting another topic for day one was communication things like PDC predeparture clearance cpdlc controller pilot data Link Communications and other ways that you might communicate with your company we also talk about checklists operational control dispatch and the interface between pilots and dispatch which is Amazing by the way we also talked about equipment mels and cels minimum equipment lists and configuration deviation lists and what to do if there is an issue with uh equipment on your airplane next we cover round operations that's taxing uh ramp procedures Runway incursion avoidance airport situational awareness briefings hotspots and other topics like low visibility operations which we'll talk about later so that's a lot for day one and real quick if you like this content I'd really appreciate a touch and go on the like And subscribe buttons thank you okay day two started with knowledge and content around turbine engines we talked about monitoring the different types of malfunctions that you might have to deal with the different issues with starts or uh compressor stalls next we got into performance of the turbine aircraft the V1 VR V2 speeds Rudder usage and what does that really mean in a larger aircraft and it's very different than what you might have learned in your single engine airplane what different configurations of the airplane would do in a takeoff scenario uh with both or one engine that might be flap settings or um anti- I equipment as it turned on or off we talked a lot about automation during day two the autopilot the flight director the FMS all the things that make flying a bigger airplane easier on the pilot but what also what are the the critical pitfalls that may happen with overreliance upon automation we also cover GPS lnav vnav rmp uh different operational specs that the airlines typically used with their automation capabilities and of course adsb tcast and toss I'll just say just the amount of automation that's available is such a safety enhancement it's amazing as long as you know how to use the automation then it can be your best friend the last topic for day two was around meteorology and weather and what are the things that air carriers have to deal with and those are things like turbulence or icing wind shear crosswind different breaking actions on the surface of the runways we talked about smigs which is basically low visibility operations at an airport and how do you get around an airport on the ground if you can't see anything and then we finished up with cat 2 and Cat 3 instrument approaches day three started with what does it really feel like to be an airline pilot on a day-to-day basis and that's considering things like you know how do you bid what is it mean to hold a reserve line or a regular line types of Reserve that you could be on and and the requirements to be at or near the airport within a certain amount of time some real world strategies on how to increase your pay and that maybe by picking up trips that other people don't want or perhaps on holidays anything to get your pay to be double for that trip is a great way to increase your income CRM and Leadership was a theme throughout and we really dove into it deep on day three and on day three and every other day we watched scenarios of real world accidents or incidents that had happened in the lesson learned from those incidents some of them for example in the CRM showed some really poor examples of CRM and other situations that showed great CRM like the United Airlines fight that landed in Sous City with uh basically no fight controls that showed great CRM and how it did save lives CRM really means it's not just you and your your first officer of fly figuring out what's going on you've got yourself youve got your cabin crew you've got your company you've got ATC there's so many ways to remedy a situation by using all the information that's available to you one of the things I didn't know that I thought was pretty cool to find out is that when there is an emergency with an air carrier typically at least this is what our instructor told us is that the first officer is going to become the pilot flying and talking to ATC while the captain would then turn into the pilot monitoring but is the one like really working the emergency and talking to company and going through checklists the goal for both of those Pilots is to make sure that each of them are doing what needs to be done in that scenario we did look at some examples where the pilot flying got so engrossed in flying the airplane and the pilot monitoring got so engrossed in having their head in a checklist that they didn't agree with what was happening in the situation so that's first and foremost effective flight path management is making sure that the captain and the first officer are on the same page and they both agree what the problem is the solution is discuss any obstacles or disagreements and come up with the unified plan of action we also learned about how important the cabin crew is as part of CRM uh making sure that the not only the cabin crew is informed but the passengers are informed as well with what's going on kind of a rule of thumb we learn was uh in an emergency uh when it comes to communication you're going to make two calls out and two calls in the two calls out would be to ATC and to your company and the two calls in would be to your cabin crew and then a PA to the p passengers it's also cool to learn how the flight deck crew communicates with the cabin crew in a uh emergency type situation and they used a Delta the ttsr method type of emergency it may be a red yellow or perhaps a medical emergency the next T is for time how much time do you have to prepare for this emergency s is special instructions any instructions the cabin crew might need to to have or to give to passengers and finally R is repeat it back to me to make sure that the cabin crew knows and agrees with what the fight deck crew is saying so they have it those instructions repeated back to whoever gave the instructions we studied the acronym salad of volunteer safety programs including asrs ASAP foba Losa and SMS day three continued with discussions around aerodynamics without a healthy knowledge around aerodynamics you can get yourself into a bad situation and that's what happened on Pinnacle 37 well which we spent a lot of time talking about and the summary there is a captain first officer took an empty plane that they were repositioning and they decided to test the limits of how of the service ceiling of the airplane so they ended up having such a high angle of attack both the engine blamed out cooled down and cor locked and there was no recovery possible that led us to talk about coffing Corner which is really being between exceeding your critical angle of attack and a stall and being so close and almost ceeding the mock induced buffeting air speed which would cause instability in an airplane and through our simulation later in the week we were able to see how close you can be between that stall number and that critical mock number we did talk a lot about Mock and mock speeds and why getting above critical mock in in a transport airplane is such a bad idea learned about the mock buffet and fluttering tendencies in those swep back Wing airplanes and we also learned potential stall scenario you get the stick Shaker stick Pusher but in a exceeding that critical mock number you get a clacker that happens so the pilots are certainly aware if they are going to exceed that critical mock number and then the discussion went to turbulence and really a lot of that was around you know predicting turbulence and using company resources to determine where turbulence is going to be throughout the training but really in day four the upset recovery technique of push roll power stable wi really was drilled into all of our our heads of how important that is we looked at several cases where Pilots really just forgot those basic stick and Rudder type skills when they're in a stall that they need to push uh Air France was certainly an example of that where they were basically in a stall all the way down to the ocean and uh we know that didn't work out that expanded envelope training um we would certainly cover that later in the simulators which I'll talk about but that upset recovery technique having that really ingrained in what you do as an automatic uh response to an upset recovery situation was really hammered hard and before we talk about the simulator what happened there Dela did a great job bringing in different guest speakers people with different um areas of expertise within the company to talk about what I'd say probably those had three different speakers those were probably the highlight of much of the training is just getting that Insider Real World Knowledge of what it's like to be in be at an airline another interesting thing about the class there's 14 of us in this class and 11 of the pilots were military B military Pilots there were three of us civilian pilots and uh only two of us didn't have any turbine time at all so it was a little intimidating at first going in thinking um you know all these folks know so much about Jets and turbines and and how they work and um but really everybody was very humble and there to learn and there's things that you know I certainly learned from talking to the military pilots and how they do things and some of the military Pilots were even curious about you know how do I go about getting checked out into 172 so uh we traded information and uh camarad re was really good we each were assigned a simulator partner uh my guy was a former um KC 135 pilot he got lucky he got me the the single Legend pilot but despite our experienced differences uh the simulator time was amazing I think for us both um our simulator instructor prepped us before each session on what we're going to do the procedures around it we weren't there to show proficiency and all these things but really just to get exposed to it which was which was cool there was no pressure to you know make sure that you did this V1 cut take off exactly perfectly it was more about the exposure my simulator was the Airbus 220 which is really fun airplane so I hear from other Pilots to fly and the simulator was no different it was it was it it was really cool from stepping in the simulator from you know start to finish we went through what is it really like when you arrive at your gate to your airplane um to check out the maintenance logs and the air worthiness to get your weight data record from dispatch U make sure all your numbers are good went through you know using operating the FMS and how important that is to make sure everything is set up just like you want it with all the numbers we learned how to communicate with dispatch and ATC with really through computer uh and not through voice in the simulator and in the classroom when we really talk about performance and all the numbers and the air speeds it's all built around one engine operation I mean the Airlines and and air carriers are locked and loaded ready to fly on one engine and that's what they're guaranteeing performance is that if they Lo lose an engine all the numbers we got for like takeoff distances or flap settings were based upon what happens if you lose an engine at the most critical time so there's so much safety built into air carrier operations it's really phenomenal each lesson in the simulator was very specific but some of the things just in general that we covered um is use of Auto brakes and auto Throttle auto land and autopilot all that automation you know within the FMS and F flight director is really crucial that you know that because so much of your operation uh likely we'll be using that automation we did the smigs taxi you know the taxing with basically no visibility we also learned to use the tiller and how that's used on the captain side to um to to turn the airplane on the ground we did lots of approaches with Auto Land and without Auto Land Auto throttle to me was like one of the coolest things is that once you're on approach and youve set your V rest speed plus five the airplane's going to hold that and your job is just to keep it aligned with the runway and then flare at appropriate time that was amazing we talked about Crosswinds a lot and you know in the ga world or if you're a tail wheel pilot you know you know you're going to uh use a cross control U method to align yourself put the runway so you land straight well that usually means you know a wing low method well you can't do that in a airplane with a big giant engine hanging off the wing so uh in the airline or air career world the preferred method is the crab and kick uh we certainly practice that where we're we have a crosswind we're crapped and right at the end uh you kick in Rudder to align yourself with the runway Rudder usage was also something that was really interesting to learn about in that the airlines really Rudder is only used for a couple situ ations um it's not for doing coordinated Ste turns no it's more for directional control on the ground on laning roll out or takeoff really keeping the airplane on the runway and it really is most important in one engine operations other than that there's just not a lot of attention pay to uh better usage or coordination we practiced the tcast scenarios or events Tas and raas uh we had a couple airplanes com at us and the tcast tells you exactly what to do and you then the conflict will be avoided is then talk tell ATC what happened we also had a toss or ground proximity warning uh system simulation where basic were pointed at a mountain and didn't do anything until you know the last minute and the airplane believe me is telling you you need to do something you know we did an escape or evasion maneuver away from uh terrain that was going to be a problem we also covered several emergency type procedures one being uh a critical situation where you may have an unreliable ice air speed indication unreliable air speed has caused airplanes to um or Pilots to to not be able to fly because they're so focused on air speed and not knowing how to fly the airplane without air speed certainly it's important um to have air speed but what do you do if that does happen um and it's kind of unsettling because at least in the simulator you you just can't tell how fast you're going like you maybe could feel in a in a a piper Warrior another emergency event we practiced was the rapid decompression event you know being up at 35,000 ft and you know having all your you lose your pressurization get your mask on at at that point the automation really takes over and the autopilot recognizes the event and puts you in a descent to get you down um you know to 10,000 ft as quickly as possible there were several case studies we looked at where uh Pilots did not get their mask on or it was a or it was a decompression that just was very slow and not rapid where Pilot Falls Consciousness and um that obviously didn't turn out well windsh your avoidance and detection we went over that Sim partner had to take off right basically into a thunderstorm and perform a wind shear Escape technique which was uh you know it pretty intense so the training is definitely hard there um and certainly one of the things we learned about windshire avoidance is just to avoid it right uh use the tools that you have on board and ATC and any company information to just stay on the ground and not take off into a wind sheer um ladened environment we went over high altitude stalls high altitude performance um maneuverability of the airplane and with automation on the airplane is trying so hard to keep flying like it does not want to stall it doesn't want you to stall um our Sim instructor was able to turn some of that off so we could see and I guess feel what it is like to um enter a stall in a big airplane the recovery push roll power statewise that they drilled into is I had an unusual attitude where we basically pointed you know 35 degrees nose down air speed increasing and you still have to go through the same for push roll power stabilize uh to get control of the airplane and it doesn't happen you know that quickly I mean it's a big airplane with a lot of inertia and momentum so you have to be deliberate and predictable about your response to an upset recovery uh situation did a CAT 3 Auto Land coming back into Atlanta uh on autopilot obviously it it was cool it's amazing to see how how great the technology is and how safe it is that you can land with such poor visibility we also did what's called a V1 cut which is basically you're taking off at V1 there's a issue and you immediately pull power back usually the Cap's job reject the the takeoff the difference between V1 VR your rotate speed is usually pretty close so once you pass V1 you're committed to taking off we did a full flight from Atlanta to Charlotte gate to gate uh we did some flying out in the Salt Lake City area in Seattle Washington area one of the cool things that we also did was uh the river approach into Reagan Nation DCA into Runway one Niner uh it's really cool to see both hand flying and with autopilot how precise you have to be to fly that approach because you're so low to the ground and the airspace as we know is just so restricted or prohibited in that area that really can't make any mistakes there or you're going to get violated we also did a flight from Atlanta took off and then had an issue and had to divert um ended up doing an arrival back to Atlanta and Landing safely there a lot of the focus really was on CRM um and making sure that the pilot flying knew their duties and the pilot monitoring knew their duties and that they cross checked each other that uh there was never any question on the fight deck on who was doing what that took a little bit to get used to you know I'm used to Flying really a single pilot and it really just makes you feel like you know you're backed up with everything you do and that you get to back up somebody on everything they do so fewer mistakes are going to make get made we did some rejected takeoffs uh with one engine so we basically lost an engine before V1 and my sim partner got one with a drive Runway he was able to stop the airplane use Rudder to maintain directional control and all was well for my rejected uh takeoff the Sim instructor said hey you it's going to be a icy Runway no matter what you do you're not going to be able to keep it on the runway so I took that I guess with a great assault and he killed an engine you know about 80 knots on a icy Runway and there was nothing I could do Rudder breake uh any steering to keep uh the the airplane on the runway but really emphasizes what a critical phase of flight uh takeoff is we also got to exercise like the I guess some of the limits of the airplane just to see you know the maneuverability and the stability of the airplane um at different altitudes and what the performance would be like if we were to do some steep banking or high uh rate climbs or distance the passengers in the back I'm sure not would not love that so that's why we don't do it but it's neat to see what that airplane could actually do through all this after you do your training you get signed off you get your graduation certificate and then you can take the ATP uh written exam and from that you can go on and get your ATP check ride done for me this course made sense because it's in my backyard I didn't have to pay for travel and hotels the Delta and Delta Professional Services course is a little bit more expensive than some of the other courses I looked at but far in away I would recommend this to anybody that could take it it was just so first class and professional and real world there are just so many great stories the three instructors that we had they all were former line Pilots so they had so many good stories of real world situations that they were either in or saw and how all the things that we learned throughout the class absolutely applied one of the things we did talk about was bird strike uh risks and avoidance and I actually made a video about that and I'll put that up here uh thanks for watching stay fly everybody

Channel: Nathan Ballard

Views: 10,864

Keywords: airline pilot training, atp requirements, flight school, commercial pilot training, how to become a pilot, delta airlines, private pilot training videos, commercial pilot checkride, just plane silly, airbus simulator training, coffin corner, air france 447

Id: PvBS85pYsls

Length: 21min 20sec (1280 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024