Almost Finished

Published: July 17, 2017

Labs Today

Well, the time is winding down here in OKC. Nothing personal to the folks who teach here or live here, but I’m not going to cry if I don’t find my way back here for a long, long time. It’s hot, dry, and overall just not a very inviting place for someone like myself. Just an opinion.

On the other hand, in labs today, we finished running the problem we started Friday (as you can tell by previous posts, we don’t necessarily start a new problem every day, our rotation is a bit off), so I ran the East flow version of that problem. It went pretty well, I had a couple close compressions on my academy final, so I need to fix that up a little bit.

Next, we ran a split-sector problem which was west flow. Fairly busy I guess, but nothing too shocking for where we are at, it wasn’t overwhelming on North or South sector. Last problem of the day was supposedly their most difficult problem they currently use for RTF. South is supposed to be “harder” than the north side, but I definitely rocked the south sector run at the end of the day. My north sector run was alright, but the instructor we had on north today was just a bit over-controlling, so it was difficult to run the problem ourselves. They were nice enough, though.

At the end of the last run my instructor asked if I wanted help when it got busy, or if I wanted him to just sit back and watch. I told him to do whatever he felt comfortable with, depending on how bad it got. I don’t recall him saying until he told me, “you can let the pilots know we are done, thanks and have a good night.” I was actually a little sad, it was a really fun problem that I wanted to keep rocking. It had a steady stream of AAC arrivals/departures, and a good flow of JKE arrivals going on too. The AAC departures turned into a mess, at one point I had around 6 data blocks all jumbled up on top of each other just south of AAC (we also aren’t allowed to allow the data tags to auto-flip off each other, so we have to manually drag them around, super annoying).

I got appropriate feedback, and that was a day.

Plan for the rest of the week:

Tomorrow: Start with a new problem in the morning, “skills checks” (pass-pass class, remember) in the afternoon, briefing in lieu of the last run, so we will see what that is about.

Wednesday we do what they’re calling “targeted problems” – basically our instructors will pick problems they think we will benefit from after watching us run our skills checks. They may select problems that help up work on multitasking, duty priorities, VFRs, etc. This is still relatively new for the OKC experience down here with the recent change in making RTF a “workshop.”

Thursday is our last day, we have a final “skills check” (pass-pass class, remember), and then more targeted problems. I want to run the problem we did today, but start it at like 10 minutes in (run it on double speed) so I can work the fun part at the end. End of course paperwork starts during that last run again (2:30 pm-ish), and hopefully hit the road thereafter!

RTF has been a learning experience, can’t wait to finish up the week and head back to working real traffic and get certified at my facility!