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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...

So it is November and a lot has happened since my last update. I haven't been very good about keeping it up to date (obviously) but I will try and give an overview of everthing that has happened.

Flight Data

After getting out of the lab I started training on Flight Data. Although flight data is not the most glamourous position in the facility, it is still an important role to the entire operation. There are a lot of times when it is a rather slow position, but it provides...

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...