You are embarking on a substantial training program to enhance your skills and prepare you for future flying with this airline.  I will attempt to relay to you general aeronautical knowledge that will also get you ready for such things as live, interactive Air Traffic Control.  My primary goal, however, is to give you some insight to aviation that will make your virtual experience as rewarding and entertaining as it can be.

This program is structured into seven ratings and will involve about 15-30 hours of flying each. In addition, you will fly a specified aircraft for each rating with supplied weather. The actual number of hours flown is mostly dependant on you.  I will not be allowing much use of autopilots and advance electronic navigation techniques until the airframes get large.  So you will have to learn how your airplane behaves to get the most out of it.

The Training Centers you will be flying out of are mostly non-ANW hub airports.  This is to give you a different taste of the scenery out there.  I also plan some historical flying such as the Berlin Airlift, Flying the Hump in WWII, attempting to correct the Desert-1 fiasco in 1978 and repeating Lindberg’s flight to name a few, most these missions will be tied to the vintage ratings but not all.

Basic 
Flying the EMB-120 out of Southwest Georgia Regional Airport in Albany, GA

Basic Jet
Flying the Fokker F-100 out of Waco Regional Airport in Texas

Twin Jet
The ANW version of one of the easiest commercial airliners to fly, the Douglas DC-9 out of Santa Barbara Municipal Airport in CA

Twin Jet Advanced - NEW 5/15/2009
In memory of its production line coming to an end, we will fly the 757-200 out of Colorado Springs Airport

Heavy Jet - Under Construction
Arguably one of the finest airliners every built, fly the L1011 TriStar out of Sawyer International Airport in Michigan.

Heavy Jet Advanced- Under Construction
Using our B747 and A380 Aircraft you will operate from Homestead Air Reserve Base, outside of Miami, Florida and from Honolulu International airport.

Vintage Basic - Under Construction
Could only be the DC-3, flown from various locations

Vintage Advanced - Under Construction
Fly the B377 from various locations

Couple of housekeeping notes before we begin:

1. If you are not familiar with aeronautical Sectional Charts you probably need to get familiar.  Most of the training will involve your planning your flight and you will have much more fun and get good experience if you get the Atlanta and Jacksonville sectionals for the entire basic course.  There are a number of online stores that sell them; they generally run about $8.00 US.  They expire about every six months but that has no impact on us, so once you buy one, you should be pretty much set.  You can do the training program without them, but as I said, it will be much more fun if you get them.

2. I will refer to instrument approaches and standard terminal departure information.  You can get these charts from www.skyvector.com. 

3. There will generally be a METAR file for each mission that you will need to put in your X-Plane directory, you will also need to make sure the “Real Weather” option is check on.
 
4. There are a couple of questions at the end of each briefing I would like you to answer in your flight report.  This gives me feedback in two ways, one that you understood what was going on and two I can check to see if the missions are being flown as I intended.

5. If you are not familiar with basic VOR navigation you may want to spend some time at this site.

6. A good source of airport diagrams is AOPA, just enter the 3 letter airport code and you should get a pdf file with the airport diagram.

7. Another good source of information is airnav.com. Sometimes you will even get to see a photograph of the airport.


I am your Training Director and as of this writing I have over 2000 hours in ANW aircraft.  I am also a real world General Aviation pilot and I also have over 20 years experience in airport administration and operations.  I am also proud to say that I have stick time in one of only two flying P-51C Mustangs in the world! At the bottom of each training page you will see my name. The name is a hotlink to send me a email with comments or recommendations about the training program.

 So here we are together, lets kick the tires and light the fires!

 © Richard Howell Air Northwest Training Director--Last Updated:  5/15/2009