First Day of RTF

We started RTF on Friday. Our lead instructor is Elizabeth Froehler and our assistant instructor is Paul Lore. We'd all already met Paul in ITR because he helped out with some of the scenarios we ran in the lab. Elizabeth seems pretty nice just like Dave. I can't imagine what it would be like to get a bad instructor at the academy. I wonder if anyone's ever had one, or if the attitudes and personalities among the instructors there are pretty similar.

We picked up one more person to add to our class of ten. He's from SCT and is just here for RTF. There are normally twelve people in RTF classes, but our twelfth person dropped out or something. We started off the day with an academy orientation again, which was mostly for the new guy's benefit. Then we moved onto a section about academy airspace. This class is a lot more specific to learning how to run scenarios and such, so we have maps and stuff to memorize now. We covered the airports, final approach courses, NAVAIDs, final approach fixes, intersections, adjacent and shelf airspace, departure gates, and arrival gates. Elizabeth gave us a couple of blank maps to use to practice filling out once we have things memorized.

Then we covered a section on academy LOA/SOP procedures. This was all pretty detailed, and reviewed the facility SOPs and the LOAs we have with Aero Center, Jeske, and Springfield Approach. That was pretty much the extent of the day. I think on Monday we start the part-task scenarios (of which we've already done a few in ITR). Monday is also the first day that most of us can file our first travel and per diem paperwork. You have to wait at least 15 days from the first day you stayed in housing (which can only go back to one day before the start of class) before you can file the first set of paperwork. It only takes about 3 days to process it and get paid after that though supposedly. Our first payday is also this Tuesday (for those of us that weren't already here for the basics class, that is). I can't wait to get some money finally!