If I haven't said it before, this new airplane is diffrent. Diffrent airplane, diffrent training. The training at flight safety is vastly different than the upgrade training with Colgan. During simulator training with Colgan we give given the departures and approaches we would do. That was it. Any failures or emergencies were fair game. Pretty much anything that the instructor could come up with was fair game. This meant we had to be on the ball. We had a general idea what was coming, no take off would be normal, no landing assured.
The Q400 training is done by Flight Safety. Flight Safety does things diffrently. We get a nice solid brief in the morning from the instructors. They go in great detail descibing all the steps of training. Not only do we learn what failures to expect, we pretty much know when it will happen. The approach is totaly diffrent to me, but I find it helps. The move to new equipment is a challenge on it's own, so spending more time learning the plane, and less time fighting it helps.

Some other diffrences come from the 'colgan/flight safety' disconnect. All of the instructors for FSI jumpseat on colgan to learn basic ops, but only a rare chance do they get to see an emergency or something of the like. They do a good job tailoring the training to our 'ways' but it seems like they get their information from the students, and as you know if you watch 100 pilots land the same plane, you will see 100 diffrent landings. Meaning, you will hear diffrent ways/tricks from everybody. While everybody is standard, even the FOP says standardization will not be so strict as to limit crewmember input. They want us to be able to make changes if operations require it. Changes afoot... tomorrow is smoke/fire and fun...

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