Lab Prep

Published: July 8, 2016

So I missed blogging yesterday… whoops. Got busy with studying and whatnot.

Okay, yesterday was a pretty long last day in the classroom with some dry material. The first part of the day was a long long lecture on Wake Turbulence separation. Boy did that throw the class for a loop. It was nearly a five hour lecture, which pretty much confused the whole class. Basically, Wake Turbulence rules are a bunch of rules, half of which that don’t make sense, designed to keep larger airplanes spaced farther away from smaller ones due to the dangerous “wake” the larger airplanes leave in their trailing flight path.

We went into lab to further reinforce the concepts, which in my opinion confused the class even more (by no fault of the instructors, this is just confusing information by nature). Fortunately, a lot of the information was a review for me, so I felt I had an okay understanding of it. Of course, the instructors still managed to burn me during the practical part of the lesson (this is standard operating procedure for them it seems).

The second part of the day was composed of a short lesson on runway incursions (things on the runway that shouldn’t be). This was pretty self-explanatory stuff that was mostly a review at this point in the course. Sometimes I wonder about the order they put things in the course when presenting information, but what do I know?

Friday:
Friday (today) was a little bit worse. It started with a test (I missed one question…grr) and followed with a very long lecture on Fatigue Awareness – which was very, umm, practical? It’s non-testable material, so I think our instructors took advantage of the time to go over information that will be pertinent during our final exams here at the Academy (as opposed to Fatigue Awareness…).

The stress level today was very high, I could really feel it in the air. Another Terminal Tower Class is “PA-ing” or “Performance Evaluating” today – so everyone is constantly trying to figure out how difficult the eval was, what people lost points for, etc. It’s pretty much the make or break moment, so it’s obvious why it’s taken so seriously. Our instructors have tried hard to keep our minds off PAs, but it’s pretty difficult when your future potential career is riding on four scenarios on your last three days of class.

This weekend, I plan on posting an off-topic area on here for some other thoughts I’ve had this week. Stay tuned for that. Until then, weekend time! Next week we start tabletop labs, where we will spend one week, and then we will move into the full sim labs, where we will spend the rest of our time here at the Academy. Time is bound to fly by now.

"spread your wings and fly"