Profile For bwr5000

Happy Thanksgiving all! Sadly I won't be home (Victoria, Texas by the way) I'm on my way to Port of Long Beach now. I'm on I-80 in Nebraska, anyone have an opinion on whether to stay on I-80 to Salt Lake then head south on I-15 or drop down to I-70 through Denver to hit I-15 in southern Utah? Most important item is time, the fewest climbs the better. Load delivers late Friday.

I am officially in flatbed division for Swift. While I do not have information yet on loads I can comment about the training. So I am teaming with my good friend Edison, and yes we are team flatbed as well. The training locale we went to from Texas is Phoenix, Arizona. They found us a van load to get us out to Phoenix where we had 5 days of tie down training. They put us up in a so so hotel, but the training was incredible. Our instructor, Ray Pedersen, was top notch. In addition we had live loads to learn on. Flatbed drivers would come into the terminal and we would help with their loads. We hit the road running on Thursday and I will keep a blog for a while.

Final review of Swift Academy. I attended Swift's in-house CDL academy on August 1, 2016. The academy I attended was in Lancaster, Texas. The hotel you will stay at is the La Quinta Inn just a couple of miles from Swift. I would give the Lancaster Texas academy 9 out of 10 stars. I thought, as did majority of classmates, that Swift did a fantastic job in teaching us to obtain a CDL. I highly recommend this academy. After finishing the academy I went to orientation in Lancaster, Texas. The orientation was well run and smooth. I was assigned a mentor and hit the road running. With a company as big as Swift it is hard to control the quality of mentors. For example I was paired with an owner operator and missed out on practical nuts and bolts of company driving. But, I can adapt easily enough and adjusted to different procedures for company drivers. There was an alarming number of classmates that had problems with mentors. Before you gasp, please remember this is not unusual. You have two adults who don't know each other living in a small space, friction is bound to happen. You just have to grin and bare it. The one student who had legitimate issues was put on a mentors truck that had racist posters plastered all over the sleeper berth. Obviously this didn't work out and he switched. If you have legitimate issues they will switch you. Overall I think the 200 hours of drive time with the mentor is spot on. I felt comfortable enough to be off mentors truck afterwards.

Overall I would highly recommend Swift from start to finish in obtaining your CDL.

If you want to continue reading, I switched to flatbed and will be sharing my adventures there.

After catching up on much needed sleep today, i will write a final summary/review of Swift academy and road training.

Good morning all. I just finished my OTR hours with mentor. I will be writing a final summary on overall SWIFT training program in my CDL Academy section. I wanted to chat or ask questions for anyone driving in the Swift Flatbed Division. I will be training for 4 days next Monday for team flatbed!

Errol, you drive flatbeds for Swift? Im thinking of heading to Phoenix for the training.

Do not worry about the hijacking! Yes, last Friday I aced my DPS test in Waco. The Corsicana academy takes its students to the Waco CDL testing site. I did the pilot's test which included everything under the sun. I was relieved it was done. Without any reservation, I one million percent recommend the Swift Corsicana, Texas academy. They took me, a book nerd, and molded me into a safe and functional driver in 17 days. Amazing. Instructors are fantastic! Other cool thing is because I was one of the pilots, my mentor was already waiting for me after orientation ended yesterday. Since 5 pm yesterday I have already delivered a load to Houston and now I am driving a load to delaware! Happy trails everyone!

Day 9 of academy. Tuesday morning at 4 am. Today we continued to practice on our backing maneuvers. We are down to 14 students from 18. We have 8 trucks set up on various maneuvers. So a ton of time practicing. I worked on my parallel (both sides) all day today. I drove for at least 7 hours today on the maneuvers. At this academy you do not need to worry about practice time. Tomorrow I will test my parallel maneuvers. Thursday all students must test all of the maneuvers. Those who pass get Saturday and Sunday off. Those who don't will simply get another week of practice. Early mornings equals early bed time! Until next time forge ahead!

Day 8 of academy. Monday morning we started at 4 a.m. (summer hours to help avoid baking in the heat). So we did not go out on the road today. Instead we continued practicing all of the backing maneuvers. Today we were able to start testing on the maneuvers. You are allowed 1 fail, then if you fail a maneuver a 2nd time you automatically repeat this week. Our range instructors are very good. I went first and tested out of the 300 foot straight line backing and my blind and sight side offsets. I will be doing my blind and sight side parallel maneuvers on Wednesday. That will give me all day on Tuesday to work on them. The instructors have us do a full coupling and pre-trip each morning and after lunch. Practice makes perfect! Until next time, forge ahead!

Day 7 of academy, Sunday. Today we only did classroom testing. Very easy day. If you read and do the assignments you will have no problems passing. Ten tests today. 4 tests on logs, shifting, speed, and safety. 4 tests on logs, hours of service, etc. Then final 3 tests on mapping. Heading to the mountain bike trails to run somewhere besides treadmill at hotel! At least 4 guys in our class workout and are health conscious so we have a good group going today. I will update my log with first day of road driving tomorrow. Until next time, forge ahead!