Pilots: Do you fly EXACTLY the way you train?

Question

I'm most interested in people who fly for a living. Do you change the way you do things to accomplish training standards when you go to FlightSafety, Simuflite, company training, etc. or do you fly the EXACTLY way you train? Be honest, and no, I'm not the FAA. My background is charter/corporate. I've seen varying attitudes about this, and I'm just curious what y'all think.

Do you take shortcuts on any checklists? Do you have different "school" answers and "life" answers for operational considerations, such as performance calculations, adverse weather, runway requirements, etc.? For example, do you say "clean wing" is the only way to go when you're training, yet in life, you have a threshold as to how much is acceptable?

This can apply to private pilots, too. Do you leave your checklist stashed if there isn't an instructor in the right seat?

Please include your type of flying with your answer (pleasure, corporate, charter, airline, etc.). Thanks!

Answer 1

No flight is ever exactly the same as another, so to answer your question, no.  Do I take shortcuts on checklists, no way.  Why would you do that?  They aren't that long.  Even on a short flight, you should have time to read through all of the items.  

This is a very odd question.  I'm starting to think that terrorists might be using this forum to learn more about aviation so they can impersonate pilots.  I think I'm going to stop answering so well.  Good luck to you.

PS, if you're not a terrorist, this question is pretty insulting.  How would you expect a pilot to answer it?  Yeah, I break the law all the time.  I hope I don't get caught.  Come on!

Answer 2

well I always try to keep a margin of safety but I hardly ever do  a weight and balance except if its a new airplane or my family is coming aboard. And since I can File IFR all I really care about is thunderstorms and icing.

But I use my checklist and my GUMPS check, for insurance.

so no I don't fly the same way I fly with an instructor

Answer 3

Sometimes I smoke a little green before a flight

Answer 4

Well, I'll take a stab at this one.

Many of us in the airline world recognize that there is a difference between the "training world" and the real world.  Following exactly every single little SOP rule would result in extreme delays and no increased margin of safety.  So in short, yes we fly a little differently than we train.

Some of us think the training world is basically there to arm you with the tools necessary to operate in the real world.  If you can do the stuff required on your PC, you can fly a real airplane like a champ.

There are many little tiny idiosyncrasies about proficiency checks that make those rules a little cumbersome in practice.  For instance, the way we deal with our checklists.  Yes, I grab it and read it, but there is a very slow cumbersome challenge-response-verify-reverify listed in the SOP that slows things down a lot.  If we have 9 minutes to make a wheels up time into ORD, chances are we aren't going to read every single word three times.  Once is enough.  Another example is some checklist items are only accomplished once per flight day.  Our SOP requires us to actually say "First Flight of the Day check" prior to EVERY SINGLE ONE of them.  Its pretty much enough that we read the checklist and do the checks so I usually neglect to actually say all that.

All this stuff aside, most pilots adhere pretty well to their company's SOP.  It provides great guidance in many situations and can be a very valuable tool.  There are not many mavericks out there that just do their own thing.