Well...I just finished up ETG's on two radar positions. I was training on Departure North and Tomball. Tomball is a satellite radar position and Departure North handles all departures from all of the Houston area airports that are going north bound.

Tomball was a bit harder than North because nothing was standard. On Tomball, you have six different airports aircraft will depart from or arrive to...overflights, and lots of VFR aircraft wanting to do many different things. You have to know the types of approaches to all the airports as well as all the departure procedures for each airport so you know how to get the aircraft on its' way.

The busiest airport that Tomball sequences aircraft to is David Wayne Hooks (DWH). It is actually an FAA VFR Tower, level 7. We also have another controlled airport we sequence to, Lonestar Executive (CXO). For the busiest ETG problems you will have at least 3 aircraft inbound to DWH and about 2 or 3 aircraft inbound to CXO as well as overflights at various altitudes, arrivals into other satellite airports, and departures off of IAH, DWH, and CXO. In order to pass the ETG you cannot have any operational errors or deviations. Overall...after all the problems you run up until the graded runs by a supervisor prepare you pretty well for the graded run. I felt pretty confident going into all of them and did really well....

North Departure is a lot different than Tomball. When you work North Departure everything is so standard...until weather comes in. In the ETGs you only get to do one weather problem and believe me, it is a bear. For North, you have five points that aircraft will head to on a departure procedure depending on what their destination is. All you have to do is climb the aircraft and turn them towards that point....seems easy? Not so much...before you can climb and aircraft, you have to make sure you aren't going to hit anyone else...there are many areas that you can run over another controller's aircraft so you really have to be on your toes...especially when it starts to get busy.

There are many traps that can get you into a lot of trouble if you don't watch it. We use Pre-Arranged Coordination Procedures (P-ACP). That means we can enter another controllers airspace without pointing our aircraft out or handing them off to that controller. This can be very helpful...I90 couldn't run half the traffic it does without it; however, it makes it more difficult because you have to be really careful when using this.

Overall I did pretty good on the ETGs and passed them all. Now I will go out onto the floor and start working live traffic with a couple trainers that get assigned to me. Hopefully the ETGs have prepared me well enough for this!