I90trainee

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...

Well, this week, more of the same stuff...lots of ETGs, at least 3 per day. It has been pretty fun, but I'm beating myself up a little because I keep messing up stupid things that I should be getting at this point. Overall, I think I am doing fairly well. Just need to keep working on my phraseology and learn my airspace a little bit better.

We just started running our scenarios. They rank the scenarios in difficultly by percentage points. We ran the slowest problem which was a 50%. At first it didn't seem that slow, but it is just to help us get the basics of vectoring, phraseology, and airpspace down. Once we get this down, we will bump it up to a higher percentage.

In order to get out on the "floor" (radar room) we must pass three graded problems. A 50%, 60%, and 70%. In order to pass these problems...

Me and a few others are back in the trailers for more classroom training. We are learning two radar positions. It is a lot of self-study...we get a powerpoint presentation here and there and that's about it. A few days into the week, we have a few tests to take about the material we learned and then we get to start doing ETGs (Radar Simulations) on the positions we just took the class on.

That's about all we did this week....we did have a chance to get back in the ETGs and run...

Well, I got checked out on clearance delivery this week...it was pretty exciting. I was a little nervous at first when I got recommended, but my trainer said I knew all I needed to know to get certified.

I wasn't busy at all during my check ride for certification so the supervisor made me read a whole bunch of clearances and he asked me a whole bunch of questions about the position and a lot of "what if" scenarios. Overall I did fairly well and about an hour later I was...