Published: July 17, 2016
This week was pretty busy in labs. I missed blogging, but was also unable to post in real time anyways because the web server was down all week. By the time you’re reading this, I’ve either relocated the websites to a third party hosting site or resolved the problem (temporarily) until moving them onto a third party hosting site. Enough of that rant… (author edit: it’s on a third party site)
3D labs are interesting, with different complexity of problems throughout the day it seems. One run the problem seems hard, and the next run, it’s easy, but both are a “4” problem. I hope this isn’t any indication of how the PA problems (performance assessment problems) will be for our final evals. Several times I ran a problem as the local/tower controller and then sat and ran the ground, and the local next to me had a way easier or harder or easier problem than I had.
To break down the days I’ve missed blogging: Wednesday I remember as having some odd things happen in the scenarios. The folks who write these problems set up specific “problems” to occur at specific spots just to see if we catch the issues or rules that we have to be following during the problem.
Thursday’s problems went pretty well. They weren’t much busier than the Wednesday problems (maybe even less busy?) with a pretty consistent flow of traffic on the local position. Ground is boring, straight up. I’m so ready for a challenge in the labs, because most of these problems are boring. If they are challenging, they’re challenging for five minutes, max.
We’ll see how much of the following rant makes it on the internet, but Friday was a pretty rough day for me. It started with no getting nearly enough sleep (last day of mornings for two weeks now, so stoked for that!). I stopped at the gas station for 32oz of caffeinated beverage which I promptly finished before 7am class started (usually it makes it until around 10am). It seems that someone had injected majority of my class with an ego-booster drug overnight or something (yes I’m being sarcastic…) because everyone seemed to have a head the size of a watermelon in class Friday. Pretty annoying, considering the problems really aren’t even that hard…
During the tabletop labs, when we play the role of the airplanes ourselves for each other (as opposed to having an on-staff pseudo/ghost pilot control the planes, which is what happens in the classroom-lab), there seems to be a pissing contest going on for some of my classmates getting on certain positions while on the floor (since this area isn’t assigned). I really couldn’t care less, because I know how to do all the positions. It’s really funny to watch the ego showdown in the room when some of my classmates want to be on a certain position so badly and scream like little girls if they don’t get it. Overall, the tabletop labs are very boring, and the problems are wicked boring too.
3D labs on Friday were also pretty slow problems. I fell into one trap set up by the problem-creator (bravo to them, I guess) with a 757 that had to go around because a vehicle drives on the active runway without permission forcing you to send an arrival around. Once you send the 757 around, you have a two minute wake turbulence hold on the runway, and I totally spaced out and launched my next departure anyways…guess now I know to watch out for these types of traps.
I didn’t get the feedback from my instructor I expected, which was kind of a buzzkill after the problem, because I feel like I’m ahead of where I need to be right now. I wasn’t given feedback on the contrary, but I wasn’t specifically told I was ahead either, so whatever. Most of my instructors’ comments have been to the effect of “you’ll have a good career” and “you’ll have a lot of fun” insinuating that I won’t have a problem passing and checking out of my facility. I’m itching to get into the real labs (the TSS – and no, I don’t know what it stands for).
Overall, I feel like I’m really understanding how to nail down my workflow and make sure things are running smoothly. I’m not struggling with my phraseology at all – though I’ve been told to cut out some extra garbage words from my open-ended transmissions for things such as traffic calls. I’m waiting to see how the TSS voice recognition system responds before I make any drastic changes to my phraseology though. The only other piece of feedback I’ve received has been that I’ll need to slow down in the TSS or the voice rec is going to be a pain for me. I figured this was coming.
Sunday: I got the new website hosted on Dreamhost tonight. Very happy with their services, and on a new domain (you might notice it in the top of your nav bar). Eventually, when I’m not studying my life away, I’ll get all the websites over to this new domain. For now, at least I can update the blogs again. I have a test on Tuesday that is somewhere around 150 questions – comprehensive final – so trying to study for that as much as possible. I’m also on nights this week, which probably means I’ll be posting blogs the next morning before I go to class.