The Interview

So for the very few of you that don't already know, and my own posterity, here is what went down this week at my flight school interview:

I thought I was going to be flying out on a CRJ which I was excited for since I was going to get the opportunity to see and ride in the aircraft I would be flying if I got accepted to flight school. Unfortunately when I got to the airport I found out I was going to be flying on an Airbus A320. It was still fun since I had never flown on an Airbus before, but I was disappointed I didn't get to fly the CRJ. From Phoenix to Farmington I flew on a Beachcraft 1900 turbo-prop. It was pretty cool to ride on such a small plane (19 seats) and I met a really cool guy who worked for Comcast who I talked with nearly the entire flight.

When we finally landed in Farmington I soon realized that just about everyone on the plane was interviewing with me. I didn't realize this at first because I was one of the only ones dressed in a suit for the flight, which was something they told us to do on our itineraries. I started talking with a bunch of them and we all hopped a shuttle to our hotel together. My first impression of Farmington was that it is MUCH bigger than I thought. Farmington is actually a quite large town with a population of around 60,000 people. For us Utahns it's about the size of happy valley (Orem and Provo).

My dad (who drove down) got into town about 2 hours after me and basically all we did that night was go to dinner at this awesome BBQ place and hit the hot tub.

The next morning was our orientation. We went on a tour of the college (which also is pretty big) with a couple of current students and then sat through a 3 or 4 hour orientation. Basically in the orientation they stress to you that this is serious stuff, something we had all realized. All of the classrooms and simulators used for the flight school are state of the art and really nice. Their CRJ FTD (flight training device) was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. It was basically a huge dimly lit room with the front of a plane sitting in it. In front of the nose of the plane was a HUGE screen with 4 or so projectors projecting onto it. Inside the fuselage is a 100% functional CRJ cockpit with glass windows. Every single control is functional and everything down to the sound of the airflow over the plane during flight is recreated. Behind the cutoff of the CRJ was a bunch of leather chairs with large tables in front of them for students during training. I wish I could have taken pictures, but I wasn't allowed to. Needless to say, it was very cool. They also had a bunch of smaller scale Bonanza and Baron simulators that students can use at any time. After the orientation was my interview which I feel I did pretty well in. I would give myself a 7.5 out of 10. Overall I think I nailed it.

After the big day, a bunch of us met up at the hotel and went down to a local brewery/pub to meet up with a bunch of existing flight students. We were down there all night hanging out and I made a bunch of good friends...

There's about a million other things I could talk about, but my brain is wearing out. Basically I have a roommate, his name is David and he's from Ghana, Africa. I made a bunch of friends and I think I'm going to get in. I'll find out soon after Thanksgiving.

My brain just completely crashed... Sorry.