Speedy Vectors

Published: June 26, 2017

Vectoring and Speed Control

Today was a pretty chill day, two lessons. The morning started with around an hour lecture on vectors. Pretty simple stuff… fly heading two-five-zero…fly present heading… turn twenty degrees left… stuff like that.

After that, we had a pretty neat little part-tasking exercise where we had to vector airplanes through a “maze” on the radar map. Basically the point was to show us how faster airplanes need more time to turn, how fast they turn based on different factors (harder turns, faster planes), and get a feel for assigning different headings.

They really wanted us to learn what different headings look like – 050, 360, 150, etc, and get away from saying “twenty left” or “ten right” since to our instructors that implies we are stupid and don’t know the headings.

After that lesson, we flip flopped with our partners and ran the problem again. Next, we ran a practice “problem” with some airplanes into Academy Airport, Bartles, and James to practice the different headings for each airports’ traffic pattern. We are expected to know all the headings off the top of our heads for each one of those airports (downwind, base, final, turn-on headings). The problem wasn’t really that busy, I didn’t miss any turn-ons, and all the airplanes landed at the correct airport. Go me. To be fair, some of my phraseology was a little rusty (I haven’t done radar stuff since my classroom college training in 2014) but I picked it back up pretty quick.

Lunch time. I enjoyed Chick-Fil-A nuggets. Go me.

After lunch, same deal, but this time on speed control. All this is pretty self explanatory too, and shouldn’t be new information to anyone down here at this point since RTF isn’t offered to new hires anymore. Don’t say speed and knots in the same clearance, lesson over. Then, we covered the “academy land” specific rules – speed restrictions they make us use in order to “prove a point.” Just like tower class – play the game, then move on with real life. Oh, the OKC game, how I’ve missed you!

Tomorrow I think we have a block test, and then we will do the altitude lesson (thank goodness, running these problems with 10 planes at 3000 feet is a royal pain…) and then probably do some part-tasking on that as well. By the end of this week, we will be done with classroom/part-tasking and moving on to full STARS simulator labs.