Twice a year, pilots who fly the 777 and 747 aircraft must return to Denver for a checkride. I’ve posted about it previously here. The mid-year proficiency training, called a PT, is two fun-filled (snort) days. It starts out with a 2-hour review of procedures, followed by about 6 hours of annual emergency procedures training/review, followed by four hours in the torture chamber, um, I mean the simulator the next day. Doesn’t it sound like fun? One thing about the inquisitors, er, the training folks at United, they really know how to show the pilots a great time!
So. Every once in a while, I make a fashion decision that I end up regretting. Call this one of those times. After all these years at United, I thought it was high time I wore a skirt to training, seeing that it’s oh-so girly and something I never get to do on the job.
It’s not like I didn’t think it out, okay? The skirt was long and flowy, so I figured I’d have no problem moving the fabric where I needed to accommodate the steering yoke while flying the sim and still hiding my panties. But little did I know the sim wasn’t the issue–the formerly low-key afternoon spent reviewing emergency procedures was. They’d altered the emergency training portion of the PT to include…personal combat–yes, self defense–which totally caught me off guard.
I mean, we’ve TALKED about self-defense since 9-11, sure, only we’ve never actually done it. But now United feels we pilots must join the flight attendants in the air-born version of Kill Bill. Maybe it’d would have been nice to have some advance notice of the curriculum change, but hey, that’s water under the bridge now–or, more accurately, wind under the skirt, which I so memorably got to experience while playing the game of…terrorists storming-the cockpit door!
Oh! Then we got to do Gilligan’s Island when the instructor made all fifteen of us pile into a life raft. (Always fun watching the boys play with the radios and the survival kits.) All in all, it was great training and a good refresher…just not skirt friendly.
Next time I’m wearing pants. Leather pants…with studs and steel-toed boots.
Before I go, I wanted to step up on a soapbox. Publishers make ARCs (or advance review copies) of novels to give to reviewers and booksellers before a book’s release. They are labeled not for sale. To do so is like stealing from the author because we receive no money from the transaction, and no compensation for all our hard work. I recently learned of several ARCs for sale on E-Bay for my upcoming quirky, sexy anthology MYSTERIA. You can read more about it at PC’s blog. Authors everywhere hope that if you see an ARC for sale, you won’t buy it. Better yet, report it as you would any stolen property.
