Macjet

Spirit is barley a third world airline. Our training is subpar and abbreviated at best. Lots of guys mean well but the disconnect between training and the line is significant. We're now throwing piston twin pilots into airplanes and expecting line captains to cover any deficiencies in training. Add in a non-existent IT, crew scheduling who can't track crews, and a management team who is still pouting over the F9 failure and you've got the best reason in the world to keep your resume updated. This airline sucks on every level and unless jetBlue saves us we'll sink into the eternal hell of Frontier.

Now, WTF do you want come here? Oh yeah, 'QOL'. lol.

trd270

So many people complain about how bad the training is here. I thought it was a breeze, super chill learned plenty. Few FOIs lack knowledge but outside of a bunch of schedule shifting during training I can’t say it was bad. Be a professional show up willing to learn and put in the time outside of class and you’ll be fine.

putzin

Aside from a few FOIs the majority of the instructors here are great and love to teach. Yes the programs is lacking but they seem to do their best to make up for the deficiencies.

Justabusdriver1

Good vs bad and hard vs easy are two different things. The training isn’t hard especially if you’ve done a type rating already. But that doesn’t mean it’s good. FOI can explain the plane a the system but they can only explain as much as they were taught. They’ve never flown the plane a very few have jump seated enough to observe the line and even fewer known anything deeper than surface level knowledge. None of them really care either or want to be there. When spirit lowered the minimums they were dealt a bad hand and got stuck doing a job they didn’t want to do while their peers all passed them. The manuals and organization are atrocious and are changed and updated so frequently very few people in the training department bother to keep up with the latest procedures and policy changes. All that means is each instructor may be teaching you outdated or false information and each instructor may be telling you different things. Experienced captains and line pilots were usually the best but those who mainly stay in the training world were far from good. Scheduling is hit or miss too. Some people barely or not at all affected by changes or delays while others get all the delays and can fall behind by a month compared to peers. Would I call it the worst training no but a far cry from being good or efficient.

JulesWinfield

I felt the complete opposite when I went through. The ground instructors were very knowledgeable and dealt with a big manual change when I was in initial. Any questions that they couldn’t answer, they found them out and answered by the end of the day. Maybe I just got lucky. The training was very surface level, however.

SoFloFlyer

The lay out of the manuals are God awful and whoever thought it was a good idea should be o
fired. Never seen such disorganization with manuals before.

That said, I did find that every instructor knew of the changes and taught to the changes. I agree with everything else.

My biggest gripe is that 5 sims isn’t enough to adequately be ready/trained. Felt like we were taught to fly the profiles and the checkride and not much more. Granted, this program are for people with 5000 hours TT. Given who the recent NHs are and now the influx of CFIs, they better start figuring it out fast and soon.

Justabusdriver1

My friend who is in training now said the had to correct 2 fois because they got scolded for some of their flows when the fois didn’t realize there had been 3 new versions of the flow manuals. They were also heavily critiqued on their briefs despite the fois never having flown 121 or having done a real brief. One told them their brief was too long the other told them it was too short. Another instance was right before their oral one of the fois insisted they were not allowed to use the app for landing distance that it wasn’t approved and showed them the email that said it was approved.

Not everyone has the same experience. There are definitely good instructors. But there’s some really bad ones too. There’s no consistency in the department. In my experience I had about 40/60 bad to good.

DrSteveBrule

Lol perhaps the trouble with the training department is the quality of the trainees?

Spirit has made the initial training program much much easier over the years to accommodate the inability of an increasing percentage of trainees to pass. When getting a job at a major was a legitimate achievement, this program was all self study and 3 ff sims. Sink or swim. We're an airline, we can only do so much hand-holding. I dont recall initial nor upgrade being some impossible task. Know your stuff, or dont. fafo

SlimBob

I can't imagine the FOI program is going to last much longer. Indoc will probably be taught by Senior FOIs if that's the case.

PossibleDeviation

All the FOIs just got raises and retention bonuses. Spirit is going to ride with it until the merger. They are making over 100k now.