I've been intereviewed for all positions, and now I'm waiting to see if I've got the right stuff.

I'm interested to know some details about the FSS and VFR courses. I understand room and board at NCTI is included in the tuition, but what have people with families done in the past? If I am offered a FSS or VFR training course, my wife would like to move out there and work (she's a nurse) while I train. Do they want you to stay at NCTI, or can you secure your own accomadations?

Thanks,
Husky

you'd have to secure your own accomodation. you will not be reimbursed for this.

No your family will be required to find there own accomadations. You will have room and board in NCTI but it is really only a glorified hotel room. For FSS the course is only 31/2 to 4 months so you have to really look at whether it is worth it to move your family for such a short period of time. Not to mention is your wife going to be able to get a job for such a short period as well.

My suggestion would be don't uproot your family until you get through the course and get posted. If you do FSS, you would only be in Cornwall for a short while before you would be shipped off to your first posting, so not a big deal. You can be sure that you won't be staying in the Cornwall area past your initial training.

VFR is longer, but you are still facing the reality that you won't be in Cornwall when you past your training and get sent off for site specific training at your first posting. So again, the expense and all of moving your family might be just not a good idea.

Further, and this is key, from everything I have seen here regarding particularly VFR training, you will have no time to be a family man during training. You have stuff to do from morning until bedtime, so you really wouldn't be in the position to spend much time, and in fact their proximity could become a distration from your training, leading to a C/T situation.

Maybe I didn't spell the question out clear enough. Does Nav Canada mind if you live "off campus" during your training? Obviously the cost of doing so will be my responsibility.

No, they don't. One person on my course commuted from Montreal.

grimey wrote:No, they don't. One person on my course commuted from Montreal.

Thanks grimey!

It's not recommended to live off site, though. It makes it much more difficult to study with the other students.

How does it work with the regional IFR training then? There's no on-site housing. So do people tend to stay late a few nights to study together or work the PC simulator (did a Cornwall tour a few years back and they had a PC based sim that needed 2 people to use)?

yrp wrote:How does it work with the regional IFR training then? There's no on-site housing. So do people tend to stay late a few nights to study together or work the PC simulator (did a Cornwall tour a few years back and they had a PC based sim that needed 2 people to use)?

That's one of the drawbacks of regional training: you're not all studying in a prison together for 6 months, you have a home to go to.

yrp wrote:How does it work with the regional IFR training then? There's no on-site housing. So do people tend to stay late a few nights to study together or work the PC simulator (did a Cornwall tour a few years back and they had a PC based sim that needed 2 people to use)?

I found that under the new regional training, there was almost zero group studying done. A couple weekends during the course a few people came in for a couple of hours to run a few sim runs before the evals, but that was it.

When most, if not all, of the students in the course are from the city where they are training, I found the majority of the time everyone just headed home to study, or spent time with family. Group studying was virtually non-existant.