Baker’s : Two Weeks to A&P

With the 8610-2 in hand, I called Baker’s to sign up for their class. After months of working to get permission to test for the A&P, I was certainly going to follow through on actually doing so! I got my class booked, and it was scheduled for April 12, 2021 through April 23, 2021. Just shy of two weeks.

I drove up on the 11th, and checked into the Holiday Inn Express as planned. Baker’s had made the reservation, and thus I got a discount rate on the room. Thank goodness for the discount as I was going to be spending almost 14 days there. My choice of hotel was a good one, and my experience there was extremely positive. I’d highly recommend it if you go (but only if you’ll have a car since it isn’t walking distance from the school).

I was at the front door of Baker’s bright and early on Monday the 12th, at 7:30am as requested. In fact I got there every day at 7:30am, even though class itself started at 8:00am. Getting there early on Monday was mandatory, though, as it gave us time to all get checked in and up to the first classroom by 8:00am. The check-in went smoothly, and they wanted to be the ones to hang on to all our paperwork 'cause .. frankly .. they didn’t trust us to not lose it. Or have the dog eat it. Or something. :)

Our Airframe and General classes were taught by Reba Evans, and the Powerplant class was taught by Tommy Simpson. They have very different teaching styles, but were both very good and very effective.

Once in the classroom our first instructor, Reba, launched into our indoctrination. This included how the school worked, where to eat (and not eat!), rules/regs, and other organizational bits of information. Reba was a great instructor, extremely knowledgeable, and she uses a very dynamic style of delivery. We reviewed our individual schedules, and I was to test for Airframe on Wednesday, General on Thursday, and Powerplant on Saturday.

The way this game works is that you are given a spiral bound book full of questions and answers (including distractors). You are told to go through the book and for each question you read the question once, the correct/bold answer twice, and you then use a highlighter to mark the correct answer. Then move on to the next. There are on the order of 1,000 questions in the book. By the time you are done with the first pass your neck and shoulders are in pretty serious pain. Or at least mine were.

Ideally you should make two passes over the book, and they won’t let you take a mock test unless you’ve done at least 1.5 passes. I always did at least two passes, including the handout of extra questions they gave to supplement the books. The only saving grace is that once you’ve highlighted all the answers, subsequent passes only required a tally mark by each question to indicate you’ve reviewed it again. Therefore I could do that laying on my couch, or in some other position that didn’t kill my neck and shoulders!

Once a book has been covered adequately, you can then take a mock test. This is a made-up test given by Baker’s to assess how ready you might be to take the real FAA written test. You are given a notebook with all the questions and an answer sheet where you fill in the bubbles. Every mock test I took scored in the 90s (two 95s and one 94), so I only ever took one mock test per FAA written. But if you don’t at least score in the 80s you go back, study more, then take another mock test. Until you are ready they don’t send you in to take the real thing.

The real test is given in their in-house testing center. It is the real deal with monitoring done by the FAA, and subject to all FAA rules/regs/obligations. It is a computer administered test given by PSI, with all the problems that the PSI software seems to have. I passed each exam on the first try, which was a welcome outcome.

I moved through the Airframe study guide quickly enough that I got to take my Airframe exam a day early on Tuesday, which is good 'cause the General is the one that gave me the most fits and was my lowest score (still acceptable, though). The exam that was reputed to be the hardest was the Powerplant, yet it was my best score of all. Go figure. However, I think the reason I got such a good score on Powerplant is since it did have the reputation for being the hardest …​ I covered that study guide three times. Then again, maybe I just have more of a facility with Powerplant stuff. Who knows? I don’t.

I completed my last written exam (Powerplant) on Saturday by 10am, and Baker’s is closed on Sunday …​ so no class then. We asked an instructor whether we should take a "down day", or if we should keep studying.

Let me interject here that Baker’s has been doing this a long time. They know what works. They know how people succeed. They also know how people fail. If they give advice, or tell you how something should be approached, or what to watch for …​. listen to them. You paid a lot of money for their experience and expertise, so don’t be stupid and think you know better. You don’t. Trust me on this, they know what you need to do, so just keep putting one foot in front of the other and do it.

The recommendation from Tommy was that we take the rest of Saturday off, don’t touch the books, and go do something fun. Then on Sunday start studying the Oral and Practical study guide. So that is what I did.

I drove into Nashville because I’d never been there before, and I figured why not. Incidentally, the day before I had been scrolling on Facebook and up pops a post about the Lane Motor Museum. Wow! Either it was just good timing, or Facebook was doing their usual spooky I-know-what-you-are-doing sort of thing. Who knows? But it looked fascinating, and I decided to go. It was a very interesting place, and I highly recommend it if you are interested in unique and historical cars. Very cool.

That was the only thing I enjoyed about Nashville, though I was amused and amazed to do a drive down Broadway (the main tourist drag) on a Saturday afternoon. If you were mostly interested in finding drunk women, this was the place to go. There were party buses, party pedal bars, party pickup trucks, party rooftops, and I’m sure other party-stuff I just missed. Every one of those seem to be mostly populated with what appeared to be drunk women. Since I wasn’t actually in the market for a drunk woman I mainly was just amused, but also kind of surprised. After all, it was only mid-afternoon and the booze was already clearly flowing freely.

Maybe I’m just getting old, or even maybe growing up a bit (shudder), but I just can’t start drinking mid-afternoon and expect to not just be asleep by dinner time. I don’t judge, and folks seemed to be having a grand time, but it wasn’t a scene that actually interested me.

Dang …​. maybe I am growing up (finally). Anyway …​…​.

Sunday saw me diving into the Oral and Practical study guide, doing what they had recommended we do. That was to read the question, and instead of highlighting the whole answer just highlight key words or phrases. These answers are not verbatim what your DME might want, but are representative of the correct answer. So the approach is a bit different. Again, trust that the instructors at Baker’s know what the hell they are talking about …​ and just do it.

Monday had us back in the classroom (downstairs) ready to drink from another fire hose. The oral and practical lectures were given by Dillan Baker (no relation to the owner, Jennifer Baker). He was extremely detailed, thorough, and no nonsense in his approach. This is where we started being enlightened on what to expect from our DMEs, and Dillan tried to make clear to us exactly what to expect. Looking back on what he said, he was 100% on the money.

Once we moved into the shop area we were coached by Bill Prince. The demonstrations and instruction was very fast-paced, but Bill has a very easy-going way about him and also had a great sense of humor. We touched on everything from how to do internal timing of mags, to how brushes went into a starter/generator, to how to accurately fabricate and fit hard lines, to timing mags to engines, to safety wiring turnbuckles, to the parts of a jet engine, to how to rig controls surfaces, to how to solder, to how to use a torque wrench, to how to set rivets (and drill them out), to …​. well, you get the idea. This was ALL covered in the first day (Monday). Tuesday was another day of lectures in the morning, but after that we were on our own to work on whatever we felt we needed more experience with.

The instructors are always around, and always ready to assist. But they didn’t hover over us or try to guide our work. It was up to us to know where our strengths and weaknesses were, and to get help where needed. Students helped each other, and in an environment where the past experiences of students varied a lot, this was actually good. I’d never touched a turbine engine before, but we had guys there who worked on them all the time (military, mostly). On the other hand they had never seen or worked with a mag, or ever done a compression check. So we shared knowledge.

The O&P prep also included a lot of information about paperwork. How to look up a TCDS for an airframe/engine/prop, how to research ADs, how to write the various types of logbook entries, and other related stuff you need to know beyond turning wrenches.

The other critical thing about this portion of the class is group study. I had been told that you MUST find someone with whom you can study. While the first week is one where you are best served by solo studying, week two is exactly the opposite. Do not second guess this! Do not think you can do it on your own! If you don’t believe me, and try and prove you are smarter, you will fail. Period.

I got very lucky and had two really good study partners. I hooked up with Roger first, then we pulled in Mike. After the final lecture on Tuesday we went heads down on grilling each other on questions. The act of being verbally asked a question and then having to speak the answer simulated the actual interactions you’ll be experiencing with your DME. It is entirely different speaking the answers out loud than it is just thinking them inside your skull.

We met in the break room once, but it was too easy to have distractions there so we most commonly met at Mike’s hotel lobby. It was the Hamptom, which is walking distance from Baker’s. We’d sit there and for each subject in each section we would round-robin ask each other questions. The drill we settled on is that one of us would ask the guy to the right four questions, then we would go to the next questioner. He would ask four questions of the guy to his right, then we would move around the circle. This had Roger always delivering my questions, and me always questioning Mike. There were a few times when this arrangement was modified, but this is what we did more often than any other.

This meant that each of us got questions from every subject in every section. We would note those questions which gave us problems, and focus on them in future sessions. Once we had done round-robin quizzing through all the questions multiple times we did a session of randomly picking questions from sections, always touching on the "problem children" questions, but also tossing in other less problematical questions to keep us switching from hard to easy to hard again.

Each study session would go until our brains were tired (a handful of hours) and then we’d all be ready for a break. We’d go to our rooms, or go get a bite to eat, or otherwise decompress with a plan to meet back up at a certain time to get back at it. However, once when we got back together for a study session we tried for about 30 minutes and then concluded our brains were fried. It was only about 7pm, but we decided were were done. I went back to my room and used the time to work some exercises in the back of my study guide, then called it a night.

This particular approach to group study ended up being extremely effective. It was hard, and exhausting, and tedious, and not at all fun (though we laughed a lot along the way), but it was damned effective. I’d recommend it. Highly.

Mike and I were scheduled for our orals and practicals on Friday at 6:00am, while Roger was scheduled for Saturday. Friday morning saw me waking up at 2am, of course. I tried to get back to sleep, and maybe eventually dozed a bit, but was already awake when my 4:30am alarm went off.

Tired, I just started .. once again .. putting one foot in front of the other. I showered, packed up, drove through a 24-hour McDonalds (about 1 mile from my hotel), and got on the road. I got to the airport in Smyrna (where the DMEs were located) a little early and did a last look at some of my "problem children" questions. But other than about 5 minutes doing that, I did no other last minute reviewing. I figured either I knew it, or I didn’t, and more cramming right then wouldn’t change the outcome.

The DME I was assigned was Terry Dorris, and I could not have drawn a luckier card. He was great, worked hard to put me at ease, was extremely personable and clearly was (as much as he could be, given his responsibilities to the FAA) on my side. It was obvious that his desired outcome was for me to pass.

Unlike DPEs who pick their own oral questions, and make decisions regarding the flight portion of a checkride, the DMEs have no control over what questions are included in the oral, or what tasks are given for the practical. They do have discretion over how questions are asked, and how tasks are set up. This makes a huge difference. We all know that the FAA can word questions in a very awkward manner, and the DMEs try to ask questions in a way that is more understandable while keeping the intent of the question unchanged.

I missed a few along the way, but all in all I sailed through the oral quite quickly. I didn’t look at the time, but I suspect we only spent about 30 minutes on the oral. Yes, I had my brain lock up a few times! No question about it. But while Terry said that the orals are not formally graded, he did the math and said that if they were I’d have made a 97, and I should feel good about that. I think he was wanting to shore up my confidence before going into the practicals, and if that was his strategy …​ it was a good one. :)

The practicals were, as I said above, picked by the FAA. I got a reasonably easy set, and was not displeased at that bit of good luck. My list was (as best I can remember it) :

The aircraft used was a truly decrepit V-tail Bonanza. This poor thing was set up in their hangar, and had all manner of problems with it. Other tasks were set up in a work area that was shared by multiple DMEs and was designed to test candidates. All in all it was a very efficient arrangement, and things progressed quite fast.

Where possible multiple task items were "ganged together" so that one activity would count for more than one task. A perfect example was the first one in the list above. It was actually three tasks …​ do a MX logbook entry, do a 100 hour inspection logbook entry, and do an equipment list update.

Because these guys are experienced in working with candidates, and because they have such an efficient setup, I started at 6:00am and was out of their by 10:00am. It went fast, for which I’m thankful.

The little town of Lebanon is small, but nice enough. It has more 4-way stops than I have ever seen in one place, but since the residents deal with them every day never once did I encounter a you-go-first-no-you-go-first sort of situation. They are GOOD at it.

There are plenty of places to eat, not that it matters much because if you are doing this right you’ll not be having leisurely meals out. At best you’ll grab something and bring it back to your hotel room, or drag it to wherever you are meeting your study group. I ate out once, and that was on my Saturday night off. It was a Mexican place essentially right beside my hotel.

For takeout I tried a number of things, but my best experience was with a small hole-in-the-wall Thai place called Bankkok Pad Thai on Legends Drive. I got really good Thai fried rice there, a favorite of mine.

I got done early enough on Friday that I could check out of my hotel without incurring another night charge. That was good, because on my way home I had a tire fail in Black Mountain, NC and I had to stay the night there. I knew that those tires needed replacing, and intended to do it when I got home (had been too distracted and stressed before the trip to remember to get it done). I was saved by WNC Tire in Swannanoa. They have a huge inventory and had my slightly oddball tire size in stock. Equally important, they were open on a Saturday.

Other than that one glitch in the trip, this could not have gone more smoothly. I had no surprises (other than, maybe, my good performance) and had been well warned of what to expect. I got lucky on the hotel, lucky with my study partners, and lucky with the DME I drew (though, my impression is they are all good guys with the same desire to see candidates succeed).

If you go unprepared, or unwilling to work damn hard for two weeks, Baker’s won’t just magically cause you to pass. We were told by one instructor "you need to be uncomfortable now so that when you get with your DME you are comfortable then", and by this he meant that you shouldn’t slack during the training weeks, else when you are sitting in front of your DME it will be and uncomfortable, and maybe even embarrassing experience. That advice was spot on.

We started a class with about 22 people. After a few days some folks were missing, and I don’t know if they bailed out or had issues or what the story was. It wasn’t any of my business, so I didn’t inquire. When we moved down to the O&P prep class on the second Monday, there were fewer still. My guess is that the folks who were missing were still struggling to pass their written exams, but again it wasn’t any of my business so I didn’t inquire. I do know that some of them showed up later in the second week, and Dillan was re-running some of the lectures for the late arrivals. I don’t know why those people might have had difficulties, but I hope it wasn’t simply because they didn’t listen to the advice from the instructors. That would be a sad way to fail since it is so easy to just do the smart thing. Ok, maybe "easy" isn’t the right word, but it can be done. :)

I already have friends saying I should go get my IA next. Maybe I will, but I’m thankful that I don’t have to consider that for a few years. Maybe by then the feeling of exhaustion will have faded, and I’ll be willing to endure what it takes to get over the hurdles again. Maybe. I guess time will tell.

However, as of Friday, April 23, 2021, I was deemed to be an FAA certified A&P mechanic. Amazing.