Changes

I was hired at American when I was 28 years old.  It is funny to me now that I thought I was getting old.  During that time my life everything was changing so fast.  We moved from San Antonio to Miami.  Mike started telecommuting for the first time.  I was thrown into the fire of Boeing 727 Flight Engineer school which was like drinking from a fire hose.  I was young and didn't know any better, I don't remember being nervous about any of those huge life changes.  Throughout my career I would fly with older people who were worried about changing planes.  They would complain about changes in our checklist or some new procedure.  I was young and things like that didn't bother me.

It is funny how things come around and if I am honest with myself, I am becoming that older person who wants to resist the change.  We are merging with US Air and daily we get things in the mail that tell us how things are being done differently.  Our bidding process, our uniforms, our training are all in the process of change.  I find myself thinking, what was wrong with the way we did it before?

I am starting to feel old when they tell me it is time for my airplane to go into retirement.  Now I have another big decision to make.  Do I want to fly wide bodies or move to another narrow body jet.  I have been pondering this for a long while.  I finally decided to fly a Boeing narrow body aircraft.  Why? I really can't tell you why.  But I did finally make up my mind.  I guess if you hear the saying," If it ain't Boeing I ain't going" enough you start to feel that way.  So I put my bid in for the B 737 thinking I would go to training in August or later July.

Just like most things with bidding I was wrong and they awarded me a June 18th class date on the B 737.  There will be 2 weeks of ground school and two weeks of simulator training.  Then I will take a check ride then go out with an instructor on some trips.  Classes will be in the flight academy five days a week and then I will have two days off to recover and study.  It will be a lot of material to cover in a short period of time.  That is why I will try to study at home and be prepared for the fun and games prior to day 1.  In a little over a month, I will be type rated in the to fly the B 737.

I have previous experience on the B 727, B 757, B 767 to kind of help in the basic systems which are usually similar.  The switches and buttons might be in a similar place so that will help.  After 18 years of training every 9 months for recurrent and also my other training that involved the S 80 plus those other Boeing jets.  You would think that I would be confident that this is going to be easy.  It won't be easy and I will have to buckle down and study really hard for a few months. Then, I will have to learn out on the line.  I will be explaining to the Captain that I am new on this airplane so please feel free to show me a better way if you have one.  I guess after 18 years I have become like the older pilots and I am a little nervous about all the change.  But I also am excited to do something new.