Day 8 of ITR

Today was awesome. It really was. :)

We started out the day with our last section on position relief briefings. It covered the responsibilities of the controller being relieved and the relieving controller, as well as the steps of relieving someone of their position. There were two short video clips showing a bad relief briefing and a good one. After we finished up that section, Dave reviewed for our Block 3 test. It was a pretty extensive review, so we took the test right after that and none of us had any problems. Then he gave us a choice of having our comprehensive exam today or tomorrow. We all wanted to get it out of the way, so we decided to do it today. He reviewed for that (extensively again), and we took it right before having lunch (it was about 100 questions long). We're all done with our testing, so we've officially passed ITR (you need at least a 70% on each exam to pass). If any of you are headed to an ITR class anytime soon, don't worry about any of the tests. The reviews cover everything you need to know and I got 100% on each one, they're all easy.

After lunch is when our day got exciting. We were all given our headsets to use through the end of RTF. The RTF classes were using all four labs downstairs, so we couldn't practice in any of those, but Ed got us set up in the international lab upstairs. There are six scopes in the controller room and the pilot room is right next door. The only difference in this lab was that we didn't have an actual ARTS keyboard to use (it was a touch screen keyboard like the ones in the classroom). We ran the vector scenario first (the one I mentioned at the end of yesterday's post). It was pretty simple, but just took a little getting used to in terms of changing up headings a little bit if we over or underestimated them. We ran through that scenario and then switched out with whoever was piloting for us.

Just a short note here: if you're headed to any OKC class and have to pilot a scenario for anyone else in your class, be as quick and accurate as you can be once you get instructions over the radio. There's nothing worse than to be controlling a scenario and having to watch your planes do something different than you said, or to have your pilot move much slower than they should be (causing you to get aggravated because you end up with an error when you should have been fine and should have been able to move onto the next aircraft needing control instructions). If you're a good pilot for someone else, they're more likely to be a good pilot for you. And trust me, you will definitely appreciate it.

Next we ran a scenario on patterns around the different airports in the academy airspace. One group of controllers got to issue vectors to aircraft around Bartles and James airports, and then we switched and the other group got to issue vectors to aircraft around Academy and Jeske airports. We only had to turn them from the downwind leg, onto the base leg, and then an intercept for final, and Dave told us he didn't want us to issue any approach clearances yet. Then we all ran a similar scenario, only we had all four airports at once.

Our final scenario of the day was one with departures off of Academy. I think there were only about ten departures to deal with total. Some went out of the Mayes gate, some out of the Colin gate, two were headed up to Springfield, and one was a VFR aircraft. This one was fun and really allowed us to practice our phraseology. Something like, "ASQ2144, Academy Departure, radar contact, climb and maintain one two thousand, leaving three thousand turn right heading three six zero." We also had a chance to get down phraseology like this: "N345DM, six miles northeast of the Tulsa VOR, turn right heading zero six zero, join Victor 4, resume own navigation."

Time spent in the labs really makes the day go by faster. We all had so much fun actually getting to control rather than listening to lectures all day. And it's great practice for us before heading into RTF. Tomorrow we get to do it all day again since we've already finished up all of the lectures. Then RTF starts on Friday (which means back to lecturing for awhile before we get to run any scenarios again).