Page 34 - Volume 20 Number 9

SPECIAL
CITATION JET OWNERS SECTION!
Professional baseball players have required annual It turns out that devising your own initial or re-current
annual jet aircraft training program, acceptable to both the insurance company and the FAA, is just not that simple. The insurance companies usually want to see several days of formal ground school in which the airplane’s systems and operational limitations are reviewed, plus some flight training in the airplane (or simulator) leading to the satisfactory completion of an FAR 61.58 check ride. The FAA itself just requires completion of the FAR 61.58 check ride, but that is no easy thing either. A “61.58 ride” basically involves satisfactorily completing the entire ATP checkride, while being observed by a Designated Pilot Examiner (DPE) approved and current in the aircraft...an exceedingly rare species...or an actual FAA inspector...a species now almost extinct.
The formal ground school problem we resolved by putting together an audio-visual program which included the airplane’s Pilot Operating Handbook, plus various diagrams, and memory item checklists we had collectively accumulated over time. The three of us then reviewed this material in a class-room type setting over a period of several days, at the end of which we self- administered a 14-page list of checkride-type questions one of us had acquired from a friend in that business.
training, which is commonly completed in the
spring in a warm, sunny location, on green grass and with attractive onlookers staring admiringly through the fence. Jet pilots also have required annual training, but it almost always scheduled in some frozen, dark mid- western state in the middle of winter, or a blisteringly hot and sweaty desert one in the middle of summer. And, rather than training out in the open with a nice breeze blowing, the practice field is most often an aircraft “simulator”, which is a 6x6-foot black box, with some ugly curmudgeon sitting in the back chewing gum and making the occasional comment about your lack of professional flying skills.
All of us having endured this very expensive, FAR Part 142 type black-box unpleasantness more often that we wish to remember, when a CJ2 came into the fleet this spring, the small group of professional pilots I fly with decided to run our own “in house” annual training program in the actual airplane. We also decided to do this in the sunny, spring month of May right at our home airport, thus not only avoiding the dreaded “black box”, but also the inevitable stay at one of those infamous chain hotels with the “free” powdered scrambled egg breakfasts.
32 • TWIN & TURBINE
SEPTEMBER 2016
Spring Training
By Kevin Ware