November 2016 ATC Update

Well, my updates have slipped into monthly updates, but that might be okay with me, I tend to stay pretty busy. Here’s a recap of the past month (I actually did write an update for October, but forgot to publish it live (update: it’s up now)… oops!).

Most of the month of October at work was spent training on ground control and awaiting certification. Somewhere around the 30-40 hour mark, one of my trainers recommended me for certification, but I went almost double that time before getting my “check ride” from my supervisor. On October 26th, during the morning package push, my supervisor listened in with me, and after the outbound push was over, he advised me that he was satisfied with my performance and would be certifying me on ground control.

The rest of the month was spent “seasoning” on ground control – basically working the position on my own gaining some time and experience on it.

A few days before I certified on ground, we got our newest hire, fresh out of the academy. He got his classroom training for ground pretty fast, and is now already training on ground. This last week, I started my classroom training for local control (many pilots may know this as “tower”), which is now significantly longer than ground control classroom lessons. Much of it is actually a verbatim review from what I learned at the academy in OKC.

I expect classroom for local control will take another week at least, based on the amount of map tests I’m required to test out of, as well as my CTO test and some other radar tests. In an ideal world, I guess I’ll be on OJT for local control sometime around Thanksgiving (and training will likely be minimal around the holiday given the amount of controllers who take time off for the holiday).

On a personal note, I’ve spent a lot of my free time trying to stay in shape (this job provides no exercise), catch up on projects around the websites here, and rebuild some of my servers and update some much lacking security features. I’m closer to unveiling some new blogs with some off-topic information, including some controversial subjects (but not politics, don’t worry). I know I mentioned I was going to work on this a while ago, but I actually started on it this time!

Until next time (expect an update in December...)