Happy 4th of July!

Published: July 4, 2017

Friday

Happy 4th of July! Here are the updates from the weekend and last couple days!

Last Friday we had our final written block test and the radar qualification test. The block test was on the last lessons of the book material, and the radar qualification test was the FAA/OKC version of the same test most of us had already taken at our facilities – radar rules and separation standards. Passed both with flying colors (not that it’s a pass-fail course, but since everyone seems to want to compare scores these days…).

For the rest of the day, we talked about lab stuff and then ran a boring, slow, decombined north-sector only problem in the classroom (it was technically a part tasking exercise/scenario).

We also did a lab-introduction/orientation session. Overall, Friday was pretty laid back.

Monday

Yes, we had class, even though it was the day before a holiday. So, we have a four day week with a break in the middle of it all. We all got a firm talk last week about not calling in sick today, since it would be “suspicious” or something.

Anyways, we started full-time labs on Monday. Just like tower class, we do 7 runs a day split up evenly throughout the day. It’s a little less structured than the tower side though, we are in teams of 3 students and 2 instructors, and we will work with those same people for every run, whereas tower class we were all spread around in different labs and with different lab partners.

We are allowed to come up with our own rotations since we run 2 sectors and a monitor position, but most groups I think are keeping it simple with a North-South-Monitor rotation so that everyone gets an even shot at every sector for each problem. We run each problem 3 times and then they change the problem.

It is nice having the same two instructors the whole time, because you start to learn what that particular instructor wants or doesn’t like, just like in the field.

The first problem was a departure-only problem, run as two-sector, starting on a west flow (28s) but then with a wind-shift about halfway through into east flow (10s). It wasn’t too difficult of a problem, I’d say south sector was slightly busier than north, just with the JKE departures and around 25 minutes there were 4-5 departures for the same gate at the same altitude (and we aren’t allowed to change their RAL, you have to work it out). The departures were consistent but not enough to completely slam you either.

The next problem was a west flow arrival only problem, and I felt like that one went pretty well. I ran north first, which stayed fairly busy, considering where we are all at in our experience with radar. The last run of the day was an east-flow arrival only problem, but I only monitored it, so I’ll start on that problem Wednesday morning.

Unlike tower class, we have real RPOs (remote pilot operators), so we are talking to real people and don’t have to worry about the voice-recognition shenanigans from the tower side. It seems so far like the RPOs on the RTF side are pretty solid, too. We are also cutting the problems shorter than we did in tower class, which is kind of alright with me, but the problems appear to have been programed and written for longer runs, because there is still a lot of stuff going on when we end the problem after 35-40 minutes (whereas in tower we ran 45-50 minute runs). We also do a lot more pausing of problems to discuss things mid-scenario as well compared to the tower class.

Wednesday we will continue level 1 problems and move up to level 2 problems! Happy 4th of July, hope everyone is having a blast tonight!