Skills Check 2

Published: July 18, 2017

Labs

Today started off by running a single-sector problem, that was pretty busy. It was super fun. My instructor let me run it pretty much on my own, and I don’t remember making any crazy mistakes. The west flow went pretty well, my instructor encouraged me to “have fun” and “try to work it as fast as I could while being efficient.” Permission to be extreme? Yes please!

For south sector run, the instructor was not one of our regular instructors, but he happened to know someone from my facility. He spend most of the run just passively observing, and then slapping me with crazy compliments when I was done (I, as usual, didn’t want to stop working).

Both problems were fairly busy with AAC arrivals and departures, with a few messy overflights that were set up to be conflicts, and a very inconvenient BE20 popup right on the final at 7k. Very annoying. Although I had a few close turn-ons, I really felt like I was improving on my scan, not missing handoffs to center in a timely fashion (flashing them as soon as they tag up), and other stuff like that.

Skills Check 2

Next, we had round two of skills checks. Very informal, as par for the course for RTF. We ran north while an instructor ran south, and one of our regular instructors did the grading on north while we ran. If we weren’t running the skills check, we were in the classroom sitting quietly and waiting patiently for our run to begin (at least, that’s the story I’m sticking to). I ran mine after lunch, and it went very well. It was extremely arrival busy, I was slowing most of the arrivals at the gate to 210 and back to 170 by the downwind in order not to run my final into center’s airspace.

I came close to violating center’s airspace near the BRT shelf (up to the northwest, we have a shelf for a satellite airport) due to missing a base turn. I called the point out, but it was probably a tad late. I also had to break out a Gulfstream due to the speed he was going behind a Bonanza. I never expected it to work, so I don’t know why I sat and watched it for 10 miles instead of just busting him out.

My instructor said he would’ve normally been more critical of the cancelled approach, but since that’s something I’ve personally been working on, and I finally executed the bust-out myself, he was proud that I solved it myself and didn’t just switch him to the tower.

Rest of day

After that, we had a short briefing to end the day, and discussed how the next two days would work. I’ll save that explanation for tomorrow’s post, but basically we are doing self-selected problems to work out our own personal “weakness” areas. We will do those tomorrow, and have one final skills check on Thursday. I really hope Thursday afternoon we can run some really busy problems just for fun, because we always end the fun ones early, and it leaves me wanting more.

RTF has been fun, but I’m ready to get back to my facility. Only two more days of labs left, fortunately.