Regional Pilot - Initial Operating Experience
Original: December 2005 Updated: July 2024
This is an update I sent after I had started Initial Operating Experience (IOE). You have to do 25 hours of IOE, which is where you fly with a specially trained Captain who teaches you all the things they didn’t teach you in ground school. Well not really, they teach you enough to be useful when you hit the line with a “regular Captain”. Months later I’d be sitting there and we’d be bopping along and the Captain would complete some sleight of hand and I’d express my awe and ask them how they did that. There was some massive short-cut for loading the ILS frequency (that for the life of me I can’t remember 20 years later) that a Captain performed and it was such a treat to use it for years later.
Flying on the line has been fun - once the captain, plane and I were in the same place. I've got to say the first couple of flights if I was in the plane at all I was sitting way near the back - but by Sunday I felt that I was a help in the cockpit as opposed to being just one more piece of baggage to be flown back and forth. I've just got to get used to the call-sign changing every leg - I keep missing radio calls!
Back here in 2024 I remember a couple of things about IOE. I did my IOE on the West Coast and my first flight in the real airplane was to Santa Barbara. The Captain asked me if I wanted to fly the plane, but I declined since I was interested to see how he flew it and I was more confident in my radio technique than my flying technique. But soon enough I was flying the trip back.
Early in that first sequence we went to Durango, CO, and I was flying the plane (to be clear we’re both flying the plane, but one person is Pilot Flying, they manipulate the flight controls, and one person is Pilot Monitoring, which means they work the radios and do pretty much everything EXCEPT manipulate the flight controls). We’re on the descent, the weather is lovely, approach hands us off to the tower and they tell us to make left traffic for the landing runway. We had never done anything like this in the simulator, we had never done this in my first few flights AND I never did this again in the rest of my flying. It was literally the only time in my airline flying we made a normal VFR pattern. I was not prepared! We made it, but it was a sobering experience that something I’d done hundreds of times in smaller planes was something I was now doing in a jet (albeit a small jet).