My First Summative Exercise

Well I suppose you're all wondering what I do and why I never blog much. Well let me tell you a little bit about the training and the exams!

Today was fairly a-typical as I had my first summative exercise. The college is full of rooms which would resemble, some to a startling degree, the "shop floor" of the Air Traffic Control Units, most notably London Terminal Control affectionately known as "TC". The rooms are dark and dingy, with low ceilings. They are filled with workstations the main part being a Display unit. On the more advanced courses the displays are 30" flat panel screens with ultra high resolution, as they are in the field, but on my course:- Radar Skills (or Basic Course) the equipment is pretty dated, although does vaguely ressemble something of use. They are not connected to live feeds, no radio is transmitted to the outside world and no one can call you, it is an ATC simulator which mimics reality. So in the middle you've got your screen. You plug in your headset to the left next to the comms panel where you can select on what frequency(s) you'd like to transmit/recieve. To the right you have the phones switches with buzz and flash when someone telephones you. Above the phones is an ADIS screen with pertinent information like weather and runway in use etc. immediately below the radar display is a large wooden board on which one arranges and organises the Flight Progress Strips which would be (if it wasn't a simulator) legal documents and kept for 90 days. Every command etc given to aircraft must be written on the strip. There's a map way above the screen and there are other units' frequencies dotted all around. It is quite a complicated task (which is why it takes 3 years to complete) and quite beyond the realms of explaining here, but there is a lot of legislation and so many different rules and scenarios and situations which all require a specific and precise treatment, all of which must become second nature to the trainees.

On the other side of the room behind a screen is your friend off the course plus an "inputter" who drives the aircraft around the display and calls you back on the radio when you call aircraft. So for example I'd say to an aircraft "Speedbird one two lima, vectoring for an I L S approach runway two six, information Echo, descend flight level one hundred, turn left one zero degress, report that heading" and the pretend a/c would follow to the letter my command.

Anyway I digress. I had a practical examination today when an instructor watches a simulator exercise and marks my controlling. I passed. I was marked under 10 skill areas; Communication, Separation, Vectoring, Information to Pilots, Task Management, Human Factors, Data Display Management, Co-ordination and Radar Handovers, and two more I can't remember. Well it doesn't matter I did wellish and (technical alert) had some pretty good fun with an inbound who I couldn't descend coz I had an outbound underneath in opposite direction so was at FL80 15 miles from touchdown and 5 N of finals. I took a quick decision to orbit the a/c right to take the height off and fly it through the approach path and back. An annoying plan, I admit, for the pax but it worked. Anyways the instructor wasn't happy with my un-orthodox approach. I asked what I should have done and she told me to plan earlier(?!). Fair enough. Bear in mind that this was on an exam. I had a big roundabout in the sky with 4 hot and high airliners conflicting which I maverickly vectored and expertly avoided disaster and I impressed myself once or twice actually. Still didn't impress the instructor. Well on with life and in case you're wondering what I do in the evening, tonight, amongst other things I memorised the following:

Co-Ordination:

The act of negotion between two or more parties vested with the authority to make executive decisions appropriate to the task discharged.

Co-Ordination is affected when the parties concerned, on the basis of known intelligence, agree a course of action.

Responsibility for obtaining the agreement and for ensuring the implementation of the agreed course of action is vested in one of the controllers involved.

etc