First Labs

Published: July 6, 2017

The last couple days, we’ve been hitting the labs – 7 runs per day, in our usual little rotation. I don’t have much to comment about them, other than the general nature of them. Up til now, we’ve run split-sector (either North or South, but not both combined) with varying levels of complexity and business. At this point, every problem has at least a few satellite arrivals/departures, a handful of Academy arrivals/departures, and most have at least a couple overflights. We are also starting to deal with VFR pop-ups (read: annoyance on my life).

Unlike my previous college times when we ran problems like this, the RPOs don’t delete the VFRs before they call, since the RPOs aren’t fellow controllers, they’re paid RPOs with a job to do. The VFR requests vary from requesting IFR clearances to VFR flight following, to practice approaches into AAC or satellites.

The different moods in the room have been unique and different in RTF than last year in tower training. The instructors are much more hands-on, almost afraid to really let the problem go anywhere except whatever they consider the right way. At the same time, the instructors are fairly laid back and understanding of mistakes. Fortunately, RTF this month (hopefully for a while, but nobody can ever be totally sure) is pass-pass, so it doesn’t really hurt my feelings to get told to do something different than my plan when working out a scenario. At least for our class, there won’t be a final or a performance evaluation, so we can keep our fingers crossed that trend continues for future RTF students.

Today, the instructor I had was being evaluated by the manager of the RTF program (that was my understanding anyways). I ran what I thought was a somewhat decent problem, with the obvious understanding that I’m not an expert and have virtually zero radar experience beyond a few labs in college and a couple labs over the past TWO DAYS, so naturally, things are not perfect at this point. The instructor watching me gave me a fair debrief of the things I hadn’t done correct, or places where I had room for improvement. He was respectful, mature, and polite about it, while depersonalizing the mistakes I had made.

One more day, and then the weekend, finally. I plan on spending the better part of it catching up on much needed sleep.