Whether a first type rating, tenth type rating, or required annual recurrency, pilots always stress over the intense flight training experience required to fly jets. No wonder. Your certificate, ego, and maybe livelihood are on the line every time, as you’re required to fly to airline transport pilot standards—even if you’re a private pilot.
Some training centers seem to take the position that the stress is character-building and a rite of passage. However, the staff at ProFlight, a Carlsbad, California-based Cessna Citation Jet training center, goes out of its way to speed pilots efficiently through the training program while working to minimize clients’ stress levels. The initial course, which I attended in February, is typically about 13 days of training and then a day for the checkride. Some “pro-level” pilots with multiple type ratings and loads of turbine experience can sprint through a couple of days quicker. Earning an initial single-pilot rating may take a day or two longer.
The CJ3 type rating was the second for me, but the first in seven years since I earned a single-pilot Eclipse 500 type rating. Required FAA 61.58 recurrent training can be done in as little as two days, although many opt for at least one more day in order to experience the sorts of scenarios that can only be done in a simulator environment.
What’s most unusual about the ProFlight course is not what happens in Carlsbad. It’s what happens at your home or office in the weeks leading up to the training. There you’ll spend some number of hours—a dozen or more—at your own pace learning CJ3 systems, annunciators, and emergencies through ProFlight’s online learning management system (LMS)—allowing the pilot to come into the course confident and prepared. The interactive tutorial has modules for every system that allow the user to watch, for example, as bleed air flows out of the engine and through various systems. Watch the innards of the Williams FJ44-3A engines and the related engine gauges as you respond to a hung or hot start. Watch the fuel flow and see what happens when the fuel filter bypass annunciator comes on.
Each module ends with a quiz that is scored, the results stored in the LMS. For an initial type rating, the FAA still requires ProFlight to deliver a complete ground school on site, so the time with the system and the quiz scores don’t count—yet; that may change. However, for those headed for a 61.58 ride, the online course accounts for 12 of the required 16 hours of ground school, assuming you can pass a monitored written test when you arrive. Regardless, even though the time with the LMS didn’t count for me and my initial CJ type rating, it was unbelievably helpful in preparing me for the ground school and, ultimately, the time in the simulator where many of those studied emergencies play out—time and time again.
While many FAR Part 142 training companies have pilots spend a full week in ground school, at ProFlight only half days the first week are in ground school. The other half is spent in the NextGen flight training device, which allows pilots from day one to delve into the actual use of the systems and explore the sophisticated Collins Pro Line 21 avionics and FMS 3000 flight management system. The NextGen was designed by ProFlight and built by what is now sister company Opinicus, a Florida-based simulator manufacturer that, like ProFlight, was recently acquired by Textron, parent company of Cessna and Beechcraft. (More on that in a moment.)
The NextGen includes electrically actuated flight controls with Level D-quality flight control software. The graphics are more rudimentary than the Level D sim, but the open top of the NextGen makes the experience more welcoming and less threatening than the complex sim. In fact, the NextGen is so easy to use that students are taught to operate it on day one and are free to use it themselves throughout the course to hone skills as needed. I spent hours on my own practicing everything from the basics of steep turns to V1 cuts and single-engine go-arounds. Most afternoons, though, a ProFlight instructor was sitting next to me or behind me, coaching me through maneuvers and in learning the Collins system. The throttle quadrant and FMS console are all real. In the NextGen, circuit breakers and seldom-used buttons are actuated via touch screens that replicate cockpit displays.
Daily use of the NextGen assures that by the time you enter the sim in week two, you can easily set up the cockpit, enter a flight plan, run through the daily checks, and be ready to “fly” in minutes rather than the two hours most experience at the beginning.
Week two dawns with daily ground school refreshers in preparation for the checkride and a pre-sim mission brief. Each sim session is a LOFT exercise—line-oriented flight training; in other words, you have a complete mission planned out, going from Point A to Point B, but with a series of emergencies thrown in to keep it interesting. Most of the time there’s a departure procedure and an arrival procedure followed by multiple approaches and maybe a holding pattern—all of which must be programmed into “the box,” the FMS.
I opt to go for a pilot in command type rating in the CJ, which requires that I fly with a co-pilot. Given my relatively low time in jets, no insurance company is going to insure me to fly single-pilot anyhow. The PIC course means I can use a co-pilot to handle routine radio communications and checklists, although for the checkride I must demonstrate for the examiner that I am directing the co-pilot and not relying on him to manage the airplane.
My co-pilot is Russ Albertson, a former airline pilot and active Citation pilot—as all ProFlight instructors must be. As I reported, (“Waypoints: Russ is My Co-pilot,” April 2015 AOPA Pilot), learning to properly engage a co-pilot after 25 years of flying single-pilot IFR presents its own challenges. But Albertson’s a real sport as I fumble to come up with the right phrases to keep him in the loop and properly “directed” as emergency upon emergency occurs in the sim.
Albertson’s irreverent humor and the good-natured spirit of the entire staff at ProFlight make the experience less stressful and more memorable. At the beginning of the sim sessions, I was fairly convinced I would never emerge with a type rating, but by the end of the second week, I felt like I could actually safely fly a CJ3, even with multiple emergencies unfolding while in instrument conditions flying to minimums. The checkride with FAA DPE and Part 142 training center evaluator Russ DeFrancesco is almost a non-event.
Credit for the progressive and inviting culture at ProFlight goes to founder Caleb Taylor, who began offering in-cockpit Cessna Conquest training 30 years ago. He was always looking for ways to make the experience safer and more useful. He started ProFlight and purchased a Conquest flight-training device. His expertise and approach got the attention of Cessna. In 2008 the manufacturer asked him if he would consider entering the CJ training market. He agreed, and received a great deal of cooperation from Cessna to design a training program and a Level D simulator, which was built by Opinicus. Cessna parent Textron also decided to get into the training business and in 2014 bought Opinicus and ProFlight. Construction is under way on a host of simulator bays at the Opinicus factory outside Tampa. Starting this summer ProFlight will be offering Citation training out of that location as well. Look for Beechcraft King Air training to follow.
Taylor notes that every pilot is different and that a one-size-fits-all approach to training is no longer acceptable to customers. Instead, ProFlight strives to craft a course within the FAA regs that works for the skill level and time schedule of the clients—leveraging the technology in the sim, the NextGen, and the LMS to deliver the training effectively and efficiently. Its Current 365 philosophy allows customers to use the LMS year round and to book NexGen time throughout the year as available at no extra cost.
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Just another day at the office
Murphy loves the sim
If you ever experienced a day like this flying, you’d call it quits. But in type-rating training, it’s just another day in the sim. After an initial hung start, the engines start normally, but the taxi is anything but normal. A quarter mile in fog at Memphis International Airport means you follow a taxi truck from the ramp to the taxiway—where you then pick up the Surface Movement Guidance and Control System (SMGCS), a series of taxiway lights directing you to the correct runway. At takeoff, in icing conditions with a crosswind, there’s an engine problem on the roll, resulting in a rejected takeoff. Magically, you’re back at the threshold for a normal takeoff to climb up for basic maneuvers—steep turns, unusual attitudes, and various stall demos. Then it’s an RNAV Runway 27 approach to Memphis, circling to 18R, with a failed primary flight display. After the full stop, there’s a V1 cut at takeoff and a return for a single-engine ILS to Runway 27 with a full missed approach (gotta love those single-engine missed approaches!) and holding.
After an air restart of the dead engine comes a LOC 36R approach with a failed autopilot. On short final, an airliner pulls out onto the runway, forcing a rejected landing to another missed approach (two engines this time, life is good!) when—don’t you know—there’s an engine fire, so one gets shut down. Next up, single-engine ILS to 18R with a failed PFD and failed autopilot to a full stop (what a relief). But because you can’t get enough, you take off VFR (despite the tower’s warning of reported wind shear), and, sure enough, you encounter low-level wind shear and use the angle-of-attack indicator to battle through it. On downwind, you get an annunciation for dual hydraulic pump failures, meaning a likely fluid leak. Blow the gear down and plan for a no-flap landing. On landing, you give the command for an emergency evacuation, directing crew and passengers on how to exit the airplane. Time for coffee. Or perhaps something stronger. —TBH
Web: www.proflight.aero
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