Our Visit to the Alteon training facility in Long Beach

On our trip, we spent the better part of a day at the Alteon flight training facility in Long Beach, CA. They have several full motion simulators there as well as flight attendent training facilities. Dave had booked two hours on their Boing 717 full motion sim and an hour on the MD-11 sim.

For the 717 training, our instructor was Eldon. He had 28 years of experience flying for the Air Force before joining Alteon. In the course of talking with him, he said he hadn't worked a day since 1961 when he got his pilot's licence. You could what he meant. He odviously loved to fly and to teach. He ran through several difficult scenerios once it was apparent that Dave knew how to handle the 717.

After a lunch break, Jonny, our MD-11 instructor greated us and took us to the MD-11 sim. Since he had less time to work with us, we did fewer challanging scenerios, but instead got us more involved with the Flight Management Computer and working more with the autopilot that Eldon did. So it was still very interesting.

After our sim time was over, Mike, our contact at Alteon, showed us through the facilities. In addition to the full motion sims, they had a few fixed base trainers , some cardboard mockups of the various cockpits and a lot of facilites to train the cabin crew. We appreciated the time he took to show us everything and gave us each a certificate showignwe had flown the 717 and MD-11 as well as some great posters and Boeing fact sheets.