A few weeks ago I said I’d be heading home for the rest of the summer and finishing my courses in the fall, but that’s not quite the case. I have one class left for graduation: AVIT 480 (Advanced Aircraft Operations), otherwise known to the aviation department as ‘that CRJ course’. A week before I was planning to start the drive home to Washington I got a call from flight ops, letting me know that I’d suddenly been placed in the session that I’d been trying to register for all spring. This was good news, if surprising – it meant I’d have to change my plans for the fall, but it also meant that I wouldn’t need to find somewhere to live this fall.

So, I’m now a week into the course, and it’s sinking in just how hard it’s going to be. Not only is class from 7:30 to 10:00 PM, there was a quiz on about 20 pages of limitations the first night. Then there are the dozen or so flows – sequences committed to memory and backed up with the checklist – each with between twenty and a hundred items each. Not to mention the 25 different emergency situations which each have memory items… the list goes on. Both of my flight instruction courses were a new challenge, but this is going to be a tough time.

Still, there are benefits, like flying around 20 hours in a CRJ-200 flight training device. It isn’t full motion, otherwise it would be a ‘simulator’, but it is a jet. The course is essentially a ‘survey’ of what pilots going through airline ground and simulator training would face, and many alums have said that AVIT 480 really makes a huge difference when they start out on the line.

Once the course is over, then I’ll be heading back to Washington for sure. The plan right now is to do the New York trip in mid-August, followed by the annual trip to the Reno Air Races. Once my little post-graduation break is out of the way, it’ll be time to start instructing.