Sul – The Journey of a Professional Pilot

Practicing SOPs with my simulator partner, in the fixed base trainer.

Since the progress test, we’ve been giving more attention to the SOPs and practicing them in the paper tigers or the fixed base simulator.  We’ve made a lot of progress in learning the SOPs over the last few days since we’ve done most of the work on the technical knowledge of the 737-800.  We were practicing rejected take-offs and found that it is one thing briefing for it and knowing the emergency brief, and entirely different thing with actually doing it!  Things do move very quickly and at first it was difficult to keep ahead of the aircraft, but with a few goes we got there.  Chris took a recording of me making a PA, which I may or may not upload!

I took the time on Wednesday to read over the performance preamble in the operations manual, in preparation for the performance lecture which we had on Thursday.  Most of it was familiar from ATPL theory, and the night before, I also looked over my notes that I made from the Boeing performance CBT, again familiar from the ATPL theory.  Thursday was spent in the classroom receiving instruction on the performance on the 737-800 and how to use the performance tables.  All the performance calculations are done by hand including the load sheet, contrary to what most of us were expecting.  Nonetheless, after a couple of goes and examples we were comfortable with the format.  Instruction was fantastic, mixed in with some funny videos clips from the Internet to give us a bit of a break.  We were finished by around 3pm and given some exercises to complete in our own time before the exam.

We took the exam yesterday, and it took most of us 2 – 3 hours to complete.  I was deliberately taking my time and went slower than usual as a result, as I didn’t want to make any mistakes in the exam, and in addition, it had a higher than normal pass mark.  We all happy to have passed, and are now studying for the technical and SOP exams next week.