TSEW: Staggers, Departures and long weekend

Written: January 16 - 21, 2020
Published: October 2021

January 16

Last day of staggers. Don’t remember much from this day since I’m way behind other than the lead instruction wanting to super-micro-control my problem on staggers which was the last run of the day besides maybe the pro run, but I feel like we did a classroom on departures after the 6th run.

January 17

Departure problems. Talk about a clusterfuck. Nobody had a clue what in the hell was going on, at all. Come to find out we were supposed to do the instructor-demo problem BEFORE we ran it. Our problem had people coming off all these satellite airports, TMU in-trail restrictions out the jet gates… the whole thing just made 0 sense since we didn’t get to see a demo of it and to be honest, the explanation wasn’t the greatest.

January 18 - 20

Home for long weekend!

January 21

Back from the three-day weekend. Most of the class went home for the long weekend. We hit departure problems again today. Cool part is that while one person runs departures the other person runs feeders/finals combined, which is a total blast. It’s crazy how far we’ve come that on day 1 we could barely hit the holes with the straight ins and now we are running feeder/final combined up with a constant stream coming down the downwind and base legs. Fortunately they’ve backed way off on the “counting the miles” and we just have to hold gaps for airplanes now on the downwind/base legs.

Now that I think about this though (edit a few years later during publishing) … even though they weren’t harping us for the counting miles technique – we had the technique. We were probably doing it subconsciously without even realizing it. Maybe not to perfection, and maybe some of it is feel – but maybe the “feel” is the instinct and intuition to use the C – 2 – A technique they want us using. Oof, Deep thoughts.

Finally, ran a pro run tonight, didn’t hit high score. 17-1, busy problem. My 1 error was a 4.7 or 4.8 with wake turbulence on final.


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