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The past months have kept me quite well occupied; work has picked up slightly since the summer in addition to training, which for me comes due in the fall. So as to not get caught with a great deal of reviewing to do in a short span of time, I had begun looking over IFR procedures and regulations in the early summer in preparation for fall training. This would leave me with enough time to study King Air procedures and systems after returning from vacation in August, and with any luck a month or so of time between King Air training and Beech 1900 training to refresh on 1900 related material. With whatever time was left in between, I would fit in dangerous goods, aircraft surface contamination, and minimum equipment list training, among the other various courses which would need to be completed over the course of the fall.

Returning from vacation in late August I was told by one of our training captains to prepare for left seat training which would begin in the coming weeks. While flying an aircraft from the left seat requires the same basic flying skills as flying one from the right, the judgement and decision making skills required and ultimately the responsibility were far from the same. As a result, being trained to fly from the left seat would be not so much an exercise in learning to fly like a captain, as much as an exercise in making decisions like one. Over the course of the training, I was presented with countless hypothetical situations designed to test systems and regulations knowledge from a practical standpoint;

"So Josh, you are in the descent to the City, and arrival reports the visibility at 3/8's of a mile, what are you going to do?"

"Well, assuming we are flying the ILS into the city, 3/8's is sufficient so as to not impose an approach ban, but the city doesn't have RVOP, so until the visibility comes up to at least 1/2 mile, we would either have to hold, or look at what the weather was like at the international, and plan to divert there to wait for the weather to improve."

"OK, lets say you now have an engine fire on the right, how will that change your plan?"

"Ahh, well, with an engine fire we would first run through the memory actions and checklist for engine fire in flight, and upon completing those, I would declare an emergency and request direct to the approach fix for the the ILS in use at the international. They have RVOP there, so as long as the weather doesn't drop below 3/8 we can fly the approach, and they have firefighting equipment there as well, should we need it. "

The hypothetical questions continued until the training captain ran out of questions, or until I could convince him that I knew what I was talking about. While there are numerous situations in almost every phase of flight that can occur which would test a pilots skill, most are confined within the phases of flight that are inherently demanding to begin with; take-off and landing. This is where training captains will tend to focus their attention, and for good reason. An engine failure which occurs shortly after lifting off from the runway will require precise flying, and for memory actions to completed expediently and efficiently in order to achieve a favorable outcome. If the engine were to fail while in cruise, the crew would have the luxury of time and altitude to sort through the problem. Moreover, if a given crew can successfully deal with an engine failure shortly after taking off, dealing with one during a less demanding phase of flight should not pose a problem.

While I did not find flying from the left seat to be any more demanding than flying a particular procedure from the right, landing from the left certainly did not feel as intuitive. When landing an aircraft, whether it be from the right or left hand side, visual references are used to compare the alignment of the aircraft relative to the runway. When learning to land the king air from the right, my brain formed a mental picture of how the runway should look in relation to the top of the instrument panel when the plane and runway were aligned. Attempting to superimpose this mental picture I had formed from my time in the right seat, to use during my landings from the left, resulted in a handful of landings that were not as straight as they could have been. With each successive landing I refined my mental picture to account for the new vantage point. With that refined metal picture firmly planted in mind, landings became, as one would expect, a fair bit easier.

Sandwiched in between training flights and normal line flying, I would sit in the plane on free evenings and run through emergency checklists to be able to accomplish memory actions without hesitation. I repeated the actions to be completed in the event of engine failures and fires, electrical malfunctions, smoke or fire in the cabin, and loss of pressurisation over and again until they were seeded deep within my brain alongside other bits of information I hope to keep stored in my memory for sometime. While pure memorisation certainly does help to keep items like emergency procedures available for when I may need them, I have found that understanding why you are accomplishing a certain task on a checklist goes a long way towards helping you to remember that task when it counts.

Initially, it was with the intention of preparing for the flight test that I studied IFR and emergency procedures, aircraft systems and performance charts. However, the reality is that while preparing for the flight test is important the flight test is but one day, it will be the flying which follows the flight test that will be the real test.