More Classroom and Part Task

Published: June 28, 2017

Tuesday Classroom and Part-Tasking

Tuesday started off with a brief lesson on altitude assignment. This is our final major “tool” we use for separation, since we’ve already covered vectors (lateral separation) and speed. Altitude is an easy way to keep airplanes separated, and there aren’t a lot of complicated rules to go with it like vectoring can have with things like course divergence. After the short lesson on altitude, we were in for a treat.

Fortunately for us in RTF, as current, already partially certified controllers, the class is set up as a pass-pass situation class (for now). Although poor performance wouldn’t be a good reflection upon us to our home facilities, and may be an ego shot, this class isn’t “fail-able.” The tests we take are specifically designated as a feedback tool for our instructors and us. Nonetheless, it was quite the ordeal preparing for the block test between everyone else in class, the instructors, etc. At any rate, we took the block test, and then moved on with our next lesson.

We went over departures next, and since we’ve already learned our maps, headings, and altitudes, it was a pretty quick lesson. For the rest of the afternoon, we did part-tasking with departures only, but it was fairly busy for a part-task exercise. I feel like overall I did pretty well. I like how academy handles the scratchpad entries (showing where the plane is going in the aircrafts data block) instead of having to use paper strips (like we do in the field).

Wednesday Classroom and Part-Tasking

On Wednesday we had guest instructors teaching us the arrival lesson. It was blocked at 4 hours, and took nearly 5.5 hours, so I’ll let the readers guess how I feel about that! It was a long, repetitive, and slow lesson. Same as departures, we already know the basics, so this was more academy land specific rules and things like that. The new part was learning the rules for the approaches.

There are a lot of rules involved with arrivals, particularly, clearing airplanes for approaches. Aside from having to memorize several different approaches into multiple airports (the airspace we work in academy land has several satellite airports), there is also responsibility to know minimum vectoring altitudes and approach intercept angles, along with watching your basic separation and wake turbulence separation.

After going through the book material, it was time for part-tasking. We ran two scenarios each, and overall, I had a lot of fun with them. Even though they’re just classroom scenarios not in the real STARS lab, it’s still better than classroom lectures all day.

Both problems had around 15 arrivals in 20 minutes, so they got fairly busy, at least for a part-tasking exercise when you’re still half unsure of what’s going on. It was a single-sector problem and included satellite airport arrivals but mainly academy arrivals. It’s certainly nice to fall back on my college experience to help me crutch through the stuff I don’t remember from the book lessons, or things we haven’t been actually taught yet.

Tomorrow is all book work, so I’m off to bed! Expect further updates at a later date!