Written: January 1 - 3, 2020
Published: October 2021
January 1
Holiday today so no class. Went out with a few of the other class peeps, one of them nearly got into a bar fight. Classmates are cool, a lot of personalities and different backgrounds.
One of the things that makes class difficult is we do have a variety of backgrounds in air traffic, ranging from 18 year veterans of the center environment down to brand new hires with a few years of military experience. Again, this class is designed for level 9-12 tracon controllers. Lately (as in, the last five years or so, since the placement process underwent significant changes), military hires (that is, previous experience controllers) are generally assigned to level 4-7 towers similarly to academy graduates, so frankly I don’t understand why the agency is sending them to level 9-12 tracons (and desirable ones, at that) when they are truly leaps and bounds behind anyone who has previously been certified in the agency. Furthermore, several of the military hires skipped the class designed as a prerequisite to TSEW, which is RTF (I previously attended in 2017).
January 2
Death by PowerPoint
January 3
Today was part-tasking day. I’ve gone over part-tasking before in my rambles, but part-tasking is basically just a mini-simulation of a very small part of what the actual simulation runs will be, but it’s highly broken down into “parts” to just enhance one skill out of problem. For example – just departures only, just arrivals only, and usually those are extremely simple and structured. It’s really more of a here’s what to say and how everything should work without conflicts type scenario.
Some day I might link back some old examples of what part-tasking is, but let’s be real, it doesn’t matter and probably won’t happen since nobody reads this anyways.
Weekend time! Sounds like lots of drinking will be involved. Class seems to be bonding well. I think the stress of not having this be pass/fail makes things less stressful and a little easier on everyone.
Weekend time! Sounds like lots of drinking will be involved. Class seems to be bonding well. I think the stress of not having this be pass/fail makes things less stressful and a little easier on everyone.