Written: December 31, 2019
Published: October 2021
First day of class. Since I don’t have a car here in OKC, I have to take the campus shuttle which only picks up at certain hotels. It’s pretty unclear on our paperwork where the stops are, so I walked a block across the street to a neighboring hotel where I knew the shuttle stopped based on my last two trips to OKC. I quickly found some other students (one of which was even in my class) so I knew I was in the right place at least. Or we were all in the wrong place, lol. The shuttle was fashionably late, but we still made it onto campus on time. Fun fact, the shuttle being late is the only acceptable excuse when late to campus in OKC. Traffic jams or security holding you up are no good here for excuses.
TSEW class stands for Tracon Skill Enhancement Workshop, and is intended to be an extension of RTF (Terminal Radar) which I previously attended in 2017 while still in training at my previous air traffic control facility. TSEW builds on RTF concepts but is designed for high-structure high-volume radar facilities, which work some of the busiest traffic in the nation (well, except for the area in my facility… we are most certainly the exception to that rule). We will learn the book-style techniques and skills in this class on how to work busy traffic in a congested terminal environment with minimal delays and minimum standard separation.
First day of class was a few minutes of housekeeping stuff followed by the ole faithful PowerPoint lessons. Fortunately this class is only 2 days of PowerPoints and the rest is lab-based instruction in the simulators.