Searching the forums, I had a little light shed on the commercial portion of ATP Flight school. I’m still having difficulty piecing together what the commercial phase entails.
My question is, is the crew cross country time going to build all the hours necesary for CPL? Or is the commercial training in multiple phases: (Anticipating you start CPL training around 150 TT)
Complete crew cross country time to build up the hours needed for cross country REQ’s. (40-50 Hrs)
Get back and learn the CPL manuevers
CPL Checkride Preps.
More detail regarding the CPL training timeline (the website timeline is not very detailed) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for the help and happy flying!
It’s pretty much just how you lay it out. The crew phase is designed to get your hours (and your skill and confidence) up to the requirements of ther CPL. It’s followed by maneuvers training and finally yes the checkride.
Not sure what other info you’re looking for or need.
The crew cross country phase is by far the most exciting part of the program. You get to fly to different airports and operate as a crew. It almost feels like flying for an airline.
Your crew time will go towards your TT. While you are Pilot Flying (PF) you will be under foggles and the Pilot Monitoring (PM) will be able to log time as Safety Pilot. So you will both accrue close to the same time during Crew. Crew can be multiple things and its a lottery what you get. 1 student was airlined down to ATL where he flew all over Georgia, I had a partner from a neighboring location and others may be from the same TC.
I flew all over the New England, Mid Atlantic and upper portion of the Southeast.
Commercial phase you will learn the 6 new maneuvers and brush up on your Private maneuvers as they are also tested but to stricter limits.
If I remember right you get 15 hours for commercial practice and 5 hours of night flying. My suggestion is use the Sim time to get your flows down pat so you don’t waste anytime flying doing that and remember to do your clearing turns!
Tom, thanks for the response. During the crew phase, is it just you and another student, or an instructor as well? Curious, how much time did you enter commercial training with?
I’m definitely getting it beat into my head to do clearing turns right now! When you are talking about your “flows” are you referring to executing emergency procedure immediate actions and such?
Josh gonna try and hit this question by question.
-Crew will be you and another student. Sometimes you both become instrument rated at the same time other times someone waits for a partner. I’ve heard (keyword heard) there are very rare times where someone will do crew with an instructor but from what I was told is that is when the Lead Instructor doesn’t feel confident enough to send that person with another student and no supervision and they talk with the regional manager about that.
-I entered Commercial phase with like 190 flight hours and 40 sim hours (I trained outside ATP and flew with friends before starting) and I was at 214 during my Commercial checkride after I busted the first time.
Flows I’m talking about is getting the plane configured for each maneuver Clean, landing or Cruise configuration, speeds for each maneuver, how you will set yourself up for each as well. I found using the sim as my instructor yelled out a random maneuver really got me ready to be set for in the plane and be able to just use the time alotted on learning and fine tuning the maneuvers.
Thanks Tom, this is awesome stuff. I know all my questions will be answered once I get in the program, but I appreciate you taking the time. Good luck with the rest of your training, and your transition into the airlines.