Monday morning, bright & early, we continued into our next lessons: Separation & Intro to Radar. Both of these I think are pretty self explanatory: Separation -- Make sure the planes don't hit each other, no matter how high they are! Seriously though, there are a ton of rules to determine what the minimum separation between aircraft should be. A few factors that determine separation: Altitude, type of Airspace, Radar vs. Non-Radar, weather, and congestion in the ATC system.
The intro to Radar unit was very interesting because up to this point --I didn't really have a great concept of how Radar really worked. I had a general idea, but this unit cleared up a lot of details, and it also confirmed just how cool my job will be once I start working traffic!
Tuesday:
Last two lessons: Letters of Agreement (LOAs) and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). LOA's and SOPs essentially achieve the same function (rules and procedures), the major difference being whether the procedure applies within the facility, or whether it is an agreement between multiple facilities. For example (yeah, this was a real interesting unit): An SOP could be something like "Must be working a particular sector for at least 45 mins at a time." An LOA would be more like "Baltimore Tower agrees to transfer control of aircraft to Potomac Approach Control once they reach 750 feet." Of course both of these are bogus, but you get the idea. Like I said, interesting stuff haha.
Because the above lessons were relatively easy, we finished early, which meant we had the entire afternoon to do our review for our upcoming test (next class day). The review came in the form of Jeopardy, which was actually really cool. The FAA put a ton of effort into creating a very realistic jeopardy game through some software (not power point), and it was a great review for the class. Unfortunately, my team lost due to some bad daily doubles haha...Oh well!
Wednesday:
We had Wednesday off because of Veterans day, which was nice to have an additional study day, not to mention a day off in the middle of the week!! So a group of us went to a cafe at an airport not far from the academy called Wiley post Airport. Most of the traffic here is General Aviation and private jet traffic, beacuse its easier to fly there than the major airport (Will Rogers World Airport). The view was fantastic - the cafe was literally next to the runway. The food was delicious, greasy, and cheap. Here's what we had sitting outside our window during breakfast:
there were 4 Chinooks parked right next to the airport building, and they were awesome (also, much much bigger up close than you would think). After breakfast, we decided to see if we could tour the control tower at the airport, since we were already there. A few phone calls later, we were standing 5 stories above in the Wiley Post Tower:
There were some very nice private jets there. The tower experience was great for the class because we had just learned about tower positions the week before, and it was good to have a visual example of what everything was like. For me, I had been to Control Towers before in the DC area, but its always cool to get to see more!!
The rest of the day was spent studying and relaxing...for we had our first major test on Thursday.
(more updates soon, I'm almost caught up to real time!).
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