Northwest (mis)Adventure

Here's the photos from the trip.

I've been back a few weeks now. Mostly at work doing local radar class to prepare for training on radar. Worked local quite a few times now on my own. Finally got a busy session yesterday with my worst flow (RWY 7), kept everybody pried apart and safe, so that's good.

Can't wait to start radar training. It'll no doubt kick my butt but its such a challenge that I'm very excited about it. A friend of mine once said that earning your approach radar qualification is "the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life." I'm already beginning to see what they meant.

The Tower

Told you I wouldn't update again till this happened.

After a good week of working traffic for the most part on my own over on local control, my supervisor returned from vacation and gave me a checkride. I passed pretty easily and was immediately certified on local, thus making me a certified tower controller.

The next day, Labor Day, I had the checkride on TRACON Data, which secured enough positions in the facility to earn me my D2 promotion and pay raise.

Now I'm on an 8 day vacation and tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'll be hitting the road westbound. Plan is to drive highway 2 till Leavenworth and then head over to Seattle for a couple days. After Seattle head over to the peninsula, stop at Hurricane Ridge and Crescent Lake, and then start working my way down the coast. Once I get to Pacific City, OR I'll head inland to McMinnville and then up to Portland and back home along the Columbia River. Should be an interesting trip. I've got 7 days to waste time out there so I'll try to enjoy myself as best I can.

New Year

The usual lack of updating for the usual reasons.

Crazy last few months. Trained on Ground so much I started to burn out on the whole being a studious individual concept. Thankfully I got along rather well with my training team and managed to enjoy the entire process. In December I was recommended for certification and sometime in mid December I had my check ride and of course passed with flying colors.

I worked through the holidays nonstop, minus my usual days off, none of which actually fell on a holiday. This earned me a rather fat bonus on my latest paycheck. In fact somehow I've saved up more than I expected. I had planned on using the holiday bonus to jut get a new video card, which I did, maybe...not really sure if Amazon is lying about it being in stock or not. But I ended up making quite a bit extra on top of what I had planned and so I let myself get a new 5.1 speaker set up for my computer (not that it was very expensive). I guess now I can start seriously looking at cabinets for my future new TV.

For now I'm just burning time on ground working as coverage until my Local Control class starts on January 25th. That'll be 2 weeks of a "normal" work schedule, Mon-Fri, 0700-1500. It will be agonizing to say the least. I've grown quite fond of the odd schedules we work here, although now it seems I'm perpetually on a third swing shift (1400-2200). This kind of nullifies the good of moving to my new Monday/Tuesday days off as I can't even take advantage of Friday nights. Oh well.

Now to get myself back into studious, hardworking mode for Local training. I'm pretty confident this will be my hardest position, although radar may surprise me later.

Maybe I'll update this again when I get local, ha.

Day by Day

Updates, yeah, those help.

Its been...um...a month and a half I guess now since I started the job as previously mentioned. I'm out of the classroom and now have two weeks of ground control position training under my belt. Officially I have somewhere around 12 hours on Clearance Delivery/Flight Data and 12 on Ground Control. Really I have 24 hours worth of training, but I have to split the time between the positions, despite that I work them all at once. Its fun though. I've found that the busier it gets the more excited I get. Maybe not at the moment I realize it, but when I look back on it later I can't help but think I have more fun when its like that. Signs you picked the right job I believe. That and I haven't had a single day yet where I didn't want to go to work, can't say that about any of the jobs I've held previously.

My schedule is a bit hectic, and certainly doesn't lend itself well to a social life. My week starts on Thursday with a swing shift (1400-2200). This continues on Friday and then Saturday I have a quick turn to pick up the morning shift (0700-1500) and this continues on till my regular days off on Tuesday/Wednesday. So, not a whole lot going on for me on the Friday/Saturday nights. Not that I know of what to do around here on those nights anyway...

Recently the weather has turn a bit foul and cold for it, but in the previous weeks I was able to squeeze a few hikes into my days off. One on Mt. Spokane where I got marvelously lost and ended up basically climbing the mountain, but hey it was good exercise. Then a week or two later I went to Riverside State Park and had a great time, as pictured below.

This weekend I just relaxed at home. As I said the weather turned for the worse and looks like its going to stay like that for a while. At least the temperature will be coming up a bit next week. I may not update for a bit because life is a bit dull at the moment. Basically I'm just working and slowly buying the things I need for the apartment while paying off some debts. Fun times.

Great North

After a splendidly long journey through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, I finally reached Spokane Washington last Saturday. Immediately upon reaching my destination I set to work trying to find a place to live. After the first day I realized living on the west side of town might not be the best choice. Although close to work, it was rather far from everything else. So the next day I started searching for places in the Valley. Although a ways from work, its still not to bad, and close to plenty of shopping. I've since narrowed the search down to 2 choices.

However, my home search was of course impeded by more pressing matters, such as my first day of work at Spokane ATCT. Saying I was excited is an understatement. The facility is absolutely great, still feels brand new, and you can tell it had a lot of controller and tech ops input in the design. The staff were pretty nice to me since it was my first day, although I'm sure the heckling will begin soon, I'll be ready, I hope... All in all a good day and I'm very excited about working there, I really like the place. Starting to think I actually made the right choice in becoming an air traffic controller...

August Days

Very busy.

Short and sweet. Official training ended Monday with Scenario 13. 13 was a very welcome respite from Scenario 12 which is known to students as "the humbler" and henceforth to me as the "Kobayashi Maru".

Tuesday, today, began our Performance Verifications (PV). PVs are judged by supervisors from the field. Passing your PVs earns you advancement into On the Job Training (OJT), failing sends you home with a pink slip. A run will last about 30 minutes if you do well. Generally as long as you don't give up and don't kill anyone you'll pass, but I don't really see that as making things easy. Today was my local run. As we were on night shift on Monday, we got to turn around 8 hours later and come back into work at 8AM. This worked out to less than 5 hours of sleep for most everyone in the class. Then I didn't even PV until 1:35 in the afternoon, and no naps allowed at work. Despite the lack of sleep and pent up nervousness I performed very well on the PV, staying well ahead of the problem and passing with ease. Wednesday is the same schedule except I'll be doing my ground PV. I don't expect to be very nervous about that, as the local was the hardest position.

Assuming all goes well Wednesday, Thursday morning I'll be on the road heading for Spokane. I expect to pull into Spokane sometime Saturday afternoon. I report for duty on Monday morning. I have a good sized list of housing opportunities to check out during the weekend and Tuesday I beleive Dad will pull into town. Hopefully I'll be able to move in somewhere shortly there-after.

Don't expect many updates for a while. I may be without internet for a long time after Thursday.

Not in Kansas Anymore

Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been busy as it were.

Tabletops/3D came and went in their reserved 6 days. For the most part I did well. Local position was always the one to give the most trouble, as expected, but no one died on my watch at least. I did seem to have at least one deal on each go at local, in different areas of course. By the end of the tabletops/3D days while I was ready to pass the skill check with flying colors, I certainly wasn't ready for a PV.

Thankfully the PV is still a ways off. On the Tuesday following our 6 days in tabletops we took the CTO (Control Tower Operator) exam. I passed that with a 97%. We spent the rest of that day and most of Wednesday getting ourselves accustomed to the Fishbowl simulators, pictured below.


The fishbowls, named for the feeling that you are trapped within a fishbowl, are nearly fully computer controlled. Meaning, the computer gives the pilots voices and trys its best to listen to what you say and respond properly. It doesn't always work, which is why we have a ghost pilot in the back monitoring the system. Wednesday evening we did our one and only IFR scenario, which proved to be rather simple. Thursday and Friday were our first two days on the full day long scenario runs, 40 minutes each, 7 a day. In the sims, concepts like Expected Departure Clearance Times, Low Level Wind Shear Alerts, SIGMET forecasts, and so on, are left out and instead more traffic is added in for us to work. The purpose being to teach us to properly seperate traffic even when under traffic loads. The effect this has is that after two days I feel like I'm getting my butt thouroughly kicked on local. They say that around scenario's 4 or 5 people start to just "get it". Hopefully that will be case with me because as of now I feel about 2 minutes behind everything, and this stupid cough/cold I developed is making it hard to talk all day long to planes.

This weekend I left for Wichita after work on Friday to spend the weekend with an old college roomate. While I can attest that the food I had over the weekend was good, the nightlife of Wichita was rather lacking. Mostly because Wichita is a damn sausage fest, girls seem to be far and few between. Never-the-less, I had an enjoyable time and returned home this afternoon.