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.