Being an airline pilot is a pretty posh job. You get to wear a cool uniform, sit in a comfortable chair, and enjoy a beautiful office view. What could be less stressful? Hold on a second and let me dash your illusions that I so deviously built up. Airline pilots have to jump through a series of stressful hoops including check-rides, line-standards checks, and FAA “fed-rides”. One such event is the LOFT, short for Line-Oriented Flight Training.

LOFTs are very different from check-rides in that they mimic an ordinary flight with a few extraordinary situations thrown in for good measure. Last April, I had the pleasure of flying my first LOFT since new-hire training in a full-motion CRJ-200 simulator.

My flight began as a winter day trip departing Minneapolis, MN for Des Moines, IA. Our sim instructor informed me that the airplane was iced up, so we would have to deice, which is par for the course in Minnie. After running the appropriate deicing checklist, the flight proceeded normally.

As the first leg was mine, I decided to play it safe by engaging the autopilot early instead of hand flying to my usual 10,000+. With such an increased probability of bells and whistles going off, it just seemed prudent to free up my brain-space for dealing with an anticipated emergency.

Much to my surprise, everything proceeded normally. No systems failures, no passenger emergencies, there wasn’t even a thunderstorm for me to dodge. Through our descent, I began to wonder what the instructor had cooking for me. After all, I had almost a whole hour to get complacent. As I proceeded down the Des Moines localizer I wondered if we were home-free. And then the culprit revealed itself.

Nearing minimums on the ILS, a familiar voice enunciated the red letters on my primary flight display: “WINDSHEAR! WINDSHEAR!” OK, easy enough. I called “max thrust” as I threw the thrust levers forward and pitched for the ascending flight director. My captain called “positive rate,” and once the windshear warning was gone I got to work cleaning up the airplane. “Flaps eight, gear up,” I said, and we were on to a normal go-around climb profile in no time. The following landing was uneventful and my brief ordeal as the flying pilot was over.

After a quick bathroom break, it was the captain’s turn to fly back to Minnie. Clearly I was wise to go first as this was to be the ‘exciting’ leg.

On takeoff, my primary flight display failed, which I promptly announced to the captain. He aborted the takeoff as the instructor repositioned us for another go.

This time windshear got us shortly after rotation. Again, we muddled through it by applying maximum thrust and following flight director guidance. The captain engaged the autopilot early and we were on our way to a Cat-II approach into Minneapolis.

Now this is the part of the LOFT that I found interesting. Established on the glideslope, we experienced a flap failure at flaps 30, fifteen degrees away from our landing setting of flaps 45. We were faced with a real decision. Do you continue the approach and land with thirty degrees of flaps, which is explicitly prohibited for Cat-II approaches, or do you go missed and proceed to your alternate with thirty degrees of flaps slowing you down and wasting your fuel?

The captain made the PIC decision to go ahead and land. Eyeballing the chart’s depiction of 12,000 feet of runway I agreed and set the V-ref speed for flaps 30. The simulated CRJ touched down at the 1,000′ marker and slowed to a halt.

After a short debriefing about how we should do less of this and do more of that, our paperwork was signed and the captain and I were set to fly another day.

Patrick Flannigan is a regional airline pilot and aviation blogger. You can read more of Patrick’s articles at AviationChatter.com.