Does Training Get Easier?

A very common question I hear from students in college and newer airline pilots who have just completed their first type rating is, “Does this get easier?” It’s a tough question to answer because, as with everything in aviation, it depends on you. How you study, how you handle stress, how you work with someone you have never met, how you prioritize what you need to study and when. All these things depend on you and how best you learn.

I recently completed my third type rating in the wonderful Boeing 787. Previously, I had flown the Boeing 757/767, and my first type rating was in the Embraer 145. I can confidently say, that after the 145 and 757/767 training, I was more than happy to avoid the schoolhouse for a few years. Between the first and second type ratings, I remember the difficulty being somewhat similar. For the 145, I was still overwhelming myself with learning everything I could about the airplane. How many rivets did it have down the spar of the wing? How, exactly, did the hydraulic demand reservoir work? Could I build the bleed system from when a molecule of air went into the low-stage compressor section bleed tap?

Consumed by my belief that we needed to build the plane, I let certain aspects of the training program linger until a deadline approached. This added a lot of stress later in training but was accomplished nonetheless. Instead of listening to my instructors repeated claims that we needed to know limitations, flows, memory items, and profiles by heart, I was focused on my old way of training. This led to a lot of energy expended unnecessarily. “Focus on the big level items and we will teach the intricacies later” was the airline’s training center moto.

Fast forward to my next type rating eight years later. Certainly, a new airline and a much larger airplane would be stricter and want me to build the airplane from scratch? Nope. Same story different city. Limitations, memory items, profiles, flows, procedures, and high-level systems knowledge. The gist of this “high-level systems knowledge is that you only need to know the basic outline of the system, and then know what happens when you select a button associated with that system, or what the warning lights mean for that system. Even though I was now learning a completely new airplane from a completely new manufacturer (to me), I was still told the same mantra. Okay, I focused and trimmed what I studied.

The result was a successful course with much less studying and stressful nights. But also, I started to see a pattern in the knowledge. Most airplanes are certified following the exact same guidelines. Many airplanes are also using the same parts and systems logic (and even engines). You find out that the icing limitations for engines on the ground is fairly universal, and that most hydraulic systems are pressurized to 3000 psi (except the 787). You recognize that profiles, memory items, and how checklists read are also rhyming. They may not be exact, but they are very similar.

After my third type rating on the 787, I can confidently report that it does in fact get easier. But there is a catch. You must be honest with yourself after each type rating and build upon what worked for you during your training and what didn’t. For me, I have focused more and more on the operational aspects of flying the airplane as opposed to building the systems on the aircraft. This is not to say systems don’t have their place, but we have long figured out that knowing how to build a 787 and knowing how to fly the 787 are two very separate things.

For more tips on studying and how training with a major airline works, pick up a copy of our book The Airline Transition Manual and set your gameplan for training.