jarhead0863 Senior Member CTI

I was told on my tour what you all needed to be certified on to become CPC, but knowing myself, I forgot already. I know that they did say closer to 3 years for someone with no prior and 2 years for transfers for checkout time. I got in the radar room around 830 when the "rush" was starting to come to an end and it looked pretty busy. The one thing I did notice though is how quite and non-hectic it was during that time.

Phlames Newcomer

That's because everyone there is taught to do it the same way. No caziness, you know what's coming and what to expect. I miss it, it was the greatest experience of my life.
To certify, if memory serves me well, the south bags is 4 scopes, sector 1 and 4 usually combined up, the front line was two or three vector sectors but with the trips now I don't know. Dept wall had North, south, east and west plus north satalite. North dept usually combined with sat and south combined with west alot of times. Plus H/O. Good luck to any that go there.

cdamjano Newcomer NWI

I am a CTI that got picked up in the Pubnat 5 (which was OTS) and I am waiting for the time being...everything is complete but now we just wait.

jarhead0863 Senior Member CTI

Your right about where sectors 1 and 4 are. The rest, I forgot what they told me.

meatasaurusx Site Editor Chi-town

At C90 we have had several people who washed before the first year of probation (OTS hires) and they were all relocated to different facilities. Our facility manager is very good about trying to get a new facility for everyone who doesn't make it. There was one guy who was fired, but thats because he showed up drunk.

As far as what it takes to get CPC status at C90, there are two routes you can take, either departure or South satellite. Currently, they are sending everyone to south satellite to start because we have so many recent departure checkouts and trainees. Before you start training on either of those lines, you do flight data first, and then as you are training on a line, you also get VFR advisory training. For south sat. you start by training on Sectors 1&4 (almost always combined) and sector 2. these are the sectors that feed and work the final for Midway, as well as work most of the departures off of midway as well. After that, you move on to sector 3, which works the westbounds off of midway and sometimes the northbounds. In addition, there are 3 other controlled satellite airports- 2 in sector 3's airspace and one in sector 1/4's airspace- as well as numerous uncontrolled airports between all of the sectors.

If you start on departures, then you train on all of the ORD departure sectors. There is north, east/loop (these are split when we are landing 28,27L,27R), south, and west. Often north and east are combined as well as south and west, although some configurations have west and north combined and south and east. After you certify on departures, you move on to north satellite, where you work the two controlled airports and the several uncontrolled airports north of ORD.

After you finish one of the lines (departure or south sat) you train up front on ORD arrivals. On arrivals we have east arrival, west arrival, center arrival, a respective handoff position for each arrival, an east feeder and west feeder, and an east trip position, as well as three parallel monitor scopes. Center arrival is only used when we are landing a triple approach east or west. for the most part, we always have east and west arrival open, and when the traffic dictates we will open a feeder and sometimes use a feeder scope for a trip runway if we aren't landing the triple parallel approaches. You train separately on the vector and handoff positions for arrivals. Hopefully this helped to clear up the questions people had.

arg3b Senior Member Murfreesboro, TN

I must have missed something about tours since the FAA postponed them a few weeks ago thanks to the toddler controllers at JFK...

Did they lift the visitor ban?

We had 2 clubs at MTSU with 1 going to visit Memphis ATCT/TRACON and ZME and the other going to visit Atlanta ATCT, A90, and ZTL, both were scheduled for next weekend but were cancelled due to the thing at JFK.

jarhead0863 Senior Member CTI

I thought the same thing and was ready to reschedule mine, but I talked to the facility and they said that CTI students were still allowed. However, a local FCT I was supposed to go to said they could not allow anyone. Weird? Yes, but I am not complaining since I was able to get in for my tour.

arg3b Senior Member Murfreesboro, TN

Yeah, all the Memphis facilities called one club and cancelled and all the Atlanta facilities cancelled, and many individuals had plans to visit facilites over our spring break and they were all cancelled too. I guess C90 realizes it was stupid to do cancel over something stupid like what happened.

TimShady Senior Member Illinois

We're going to a facility as a class and our instructor had to make sure we are all technically in the CTI program, not just taking the class for fun or whatever. I think that has something to do with these tour bans because they've never asked before.