Halfwayish Done

Published: July 11, 2017

Today our seven problems went as follows… problem 1 was the continuation of the single sector problems from yesterday – I ran the east flow combined problem, it went fairly well other than having too much compression with two planes on final. My instructor gave me some good feedback, so that felt pretty good.

Next problem I monitored, but it was the start of a new problem that was decombined again, back to west flow. It looked fairly busy with little spurts of arrivals, with more slower planes than jets - lots of twin pistons and fast single engine. Also a fair amount of VFR pop ups (probably around 10 for each sector).

My run on that problem for North went okay, it’s always walking a fine balance of pushing the envelope and not losing separation, what to paper stop so you don’t have to “watch it” and mixing technique in there. Our instructors have really backed off on the in-problem chirping as I like to call it, so they really just let us run it and ask our plan or make minor suggestions from time to time.

Next I ran the decombined problem on South which went okay. I think my biggest mistakes were forgetting to stop an academy departure at nine thousand due to the arrivals at ten (I saw it just in time to fix it!) and missing a “slot” on final that North gave me, but overall, I felt pretty happy with the run.

Last three runs of the day was another combined single sector problem, this one was only a couple departures, a couple academy and Jeske arrivals, but A TON of VFR pop ups. Probably about 17-20 in the 40 minutes we ran, so easily one every other minute, plus dealing with the jet arrivals and departures. My biggest takeaway from the VFR pop ups was try to stay ahead, because otherwise they keep calling. At the same time, don’t answer them until you scan and make sure everything else is taken care of, or you’ll end up missing final turn-ons, frequency changes, etc.

On the North side run, I had a couple glitches, a few guys go through final (not good) when joining the localizer, but besides that, I felt really good about my run. I was able to work out all the problems without assistance and got good feedback from the instructor. My run on South went similarly which was a good way to end the day. The south run side was east flow but basically the same problem as north in terms of workload, complexity, and traffic. It was the last run of the day, before we ended the RPO (remote pilot working the planes) gave me a compliment on the line, I returned it, and my instructor concurred with the praise. Felt pretty good to end the day on a good note. Tomorrow, we will do a brand new problem in the morning, so we will see how that goes!