Published: July 21, 2016
Last night was IFR (instrument flight rules) night. At first I was kinda confused why we were doing a night on this, but once we started doing it, it made sense. We were learning the IFR rules so that we can apply those rules even in the VFR (clear day) conditions, since IFR flights always abide by those rules.
We only did two problems last night, but we did three runs of each so that each of us had a chance to run it twice (once on local and once on ground). For each problem – we also watched the instructors demo it before we ran it ourselves. Both of these problems were set up to teach us specific tasks, and give us practice at those that we will apply to slower problems that we start tonight.
The first problem was ran was a slow IFR problem, but the instructors had methods for us to “jam up” the traffic to make sure we could practice the separation rules. The second problem had around 25 departures and the goal was to get them out as fast as possible while keeping them separated (this problem switched back to VFR conditions). This busy problem was a pretty fun, I could have done it a few more times over to get more practice.
Tonight we start with slower problems that will slowly ramp up over the next 13 days. After those 13 days, we will move into our performance assessments, which is our final test that will decide if we will be headed to a facility to start more training, or back home without a job. From what I’ve heard, the problems will be pretty straightforward this week. Again, I plan on focusing my time on making sure that my workflow and technique is down to perfection level so that going into the busy problems I don’t have to think about it.
Also, one of the instructors I worked with last night was exceptionally cool, he helped us after our run giving us some tips and suggestions for when we get into the busy problems. We actually stayed after the run talking to him so long that we were almost late back to the break-out room for our debrief. Oops!
I’m waiting on my laundry to be done now – and watching Netflix. I’m probably going to review the wake turbulence rules before class tonight, since I was questioning a few of those last night because I wasn’t 100% sure on a few, probably because I was just second guessing myself.
Still enjoying night classes. In case you’re wondering – I have 21 days left, including tonight, so I’m over the halfway hump of being down here in OKC. My graduation date is August 11th. There was something else I was going to talk about, but I forget now, and it’s time to go change laundry!