Since the Academy

Published: Setember 25, 2016

Well, I’ve pretty much failed (again!) at updating blogs. Though I didn’t promise daily updates, I did promise to update at least somewhat regularly. I guess this counts as “regular.”

Anyways, here’s a breakdown of what’s been going on since my last blog. We left off with my 13 hour drive home from OKC. I ended up getting home around 2 o’clock in the morning, and man was I tired. I had the following week off through a combination of my regular days off (RDOs) and travel days, and I also took a couple days of paid leave so that I wouldn’t be rushed into my arrival into my facility.

Since I didn’t have any specific place to live nailed down in my new city of residence, I only packed a car-full of stuff that I figured could get me through a few weeks until I found a place and had time to get back home to haul the rest of it out. This worked out pretty well, actually.

My first day at my facility went pretty well. I showed up at 8am all bright eyed and bushy-tailed (that’s a lie, I was actually dead tired and extremely nervous). I drove through the gate and was greeted by my FLM and the Union Rep for the facility. They brought me inside and I started making introductions.

After a few hours of introductions and “welcome” type activities, I was cut loose to start getting a feeling for the facility by just roaming around and monitoring the traffic upstairs in the tower. Pretty laid back, overall (this accurately describes the mood of the facility in general, too). Over the next few days I slowly got different assignments of things to study, things to listen for while monitoring, stuff like that. I got a huge packet of airports/callsigns/maps to memorize at my leisure, too.

I took a few days off around Labor Day weekend to drive home and pack up a trailer to haul the rest of my stuff out to the area, and I’m currently living in a nice apartment on the north side of town. Overall, the town has a lot to offer and is pretty busy, and rapidly growing, so I’m pretty happy about that.

After Labor Day weekend, I started my classroom training at my facility for the Ground position, which took two days. The first day was a “lecture” (it was one-on-one with the staff specialist) and the second day were “scenarios” – very similar to tabletop labs in OKC, just not as fancy. After that, I had to do 5 hours of OJF (monitoring) time in the tower on ground control, and after the weekend I officially started training on the floor.

On September 12, 2016, I got to talk to my first airplane ever as an Air Traffic Controller. Pretty stinkin’ cool, as one of my friends said, regarding the matter. I agree, pretty stinkin’ cool. Since that day, I’ve gotten much more confident and fluent on the frequency (although my first transmission wasn’t that bad, and I didn’t mess up). I have three primary trainers who are on my training team, and I like them all! They all offer different perspectives and techniques for me to try and have many years of experience. I was secretly hoping I’d get at least one of the two I eventually ended up with, because I liked talking to them before they assigned anyone to me, and my luck, I got both of them!

A typical day for me right now includes 1-3 hours of time on the position training, where I basically work the position myself and a trainer is plugged in, right next to me, listening in. At first, they would stand and watch right next to me, checking all my stripmarking, watching the planes I was talking to. Now that they have a feel for how I work and my comfort level, typically I work the position and they hang out behind me and make sure nothing is going wrong.

When I’m not training, I do take breaks like everyone else, which includes walking around the facility, watching TV while eating lunch, or making coffee runs. I do spend a good part of my day self-studying, memorizing callsigns we frequently see here, and memorizing where certain planes go and the “on course” headings to those airports from our airport here.

Some days training is slower than others, some days I get zero hours of training, some days I get over 4, it really depends on staffing and what’s going on that day. I usually go in with the expectation I’ll get little training, and then I’m happy when I see I have 2-3 sessions of training that day.

I expect sometime in the next few months I’ll be checked out on ground control, and moving on to local control training. For that, I’ll go back to the classroom downstairs for a few days, do a few “labs” and then be back on the floor for training, like I am now.

Overall, I feel like things are going very well for me so far. The other controllers here are all willing to help and are easy to learn from, which helps a lot. My trainers are great, and I feel like they want me to succeed, even though I know they’re swamped doing training every day, so I really appreciate them letting me train with them.