October 2016 ATC Update

This past week was pretty busy for me in terms of training and life in general. I averaged 10 hours of training this week again (which is usually my weekly goal), even though I don’t actually have any control over how much training time I get. Considering I was out on leave for a whole day this past week, a 10 hour week for training is considerably good here.

Wednesday was probably the busiest traffic I’ve seen so far (given the fact I’m at a not-so-busy facility, I’m speaking in relative terms). Most mornings we have what we refer to as our “package push” – essentially FedEx and UPS fly their big planes in from their respective hubs, the packages are unloaded, sorted, and reloaded onto many smaller planes destined for many smaller airports surrounding us that the main FedEx and UPS planes do not go to (this is how those cities receive their overnight packages).

Basically, this equates to around 30-40 planes leaving in around an hour or so. Though this isn’t much for a big airport, the airport I work at is fairly small, so we really get our share of traffic during this time of the day. It also makes for a great opportunity for training, which is what I was doing this past Wednesday when things went crazy. The push started out normal, but then a scheduled taxiway closure interrupted the main traffic flow, and meant I had to taxi all the airplanes around a closed section of the airfield. To complicate things more, several airport vehicles also were requested permission to go between their workshop and the construction zone, which involved crossing multiple runways.

I really can’t give justice to how busy this one hour session was, but at the end of it, I was emotionally drained. My instructor had some very critical feedback for me too, that I wasn’t expecting, but certainly deserved I’m sure.

Other than that session, my training has been going pretty well. We’re also slated to get another new hire sometime this upcoming week or the week after (it’ll depend on how much leave they take after the academy). It’ll be nice not to be the lowest guy around anymore, but more trainees definitely will clog up the training more than it already seems to be. I’m still hoping to be certified on ground control in the next few weeks, but it seems that depending on who you ask that may or may not be realistic.

Oh, and I also handled my first emergency yesterday! It wasn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds, especially on ground control. In fact, it wasn’t anything different than what I’d done before for a normal flight. We got notified by the center that we had an emergency inbound for a passenger medical situation. Basically all I had to do was call on the CFR (crash fire rescue) phone to alert them to the emergency inbound. The plane landed, taxied to the terminal normally, and that was pretty much it. But my trainer got to check the “emergencies handled well box” on my training report, so I guess that was fun. I imagine emergencies would be more fun if it happened while on radar or even local control.

I actually wrote this blog in October on a plane, and apparently forgot about it until November, but I doubt anyone is reading these things anyways…