Has it really been two months?

Last week marked my second month in OKC. It seems like only yesterday I was sitting in a room in the security office with everyone I'd be spending the next 4 months with chatting about where we'd come from, why we were doing this and what facilities we're headed to. Today I'm staring at a pile of flight strips covered with markings that would have seemed bizarre to me that first day.

This picture is actually one of the smaller piles. If I bothered to count them, I probably have a few hundred of these laying around my apartment today.



In my time here, I've made some good friends, and met an even larger number of people. I've got two guys in my class both going to Memphis Center, Kendrick and Mitch. Mitch was originally born in southern Georgia, but has moved all over the country with his family and the military and was living in Idaho before coming here. Kendrick originally hails from Chicago and had moved down to Memphis last year. Both are really good guys and I think both of them will do well in ATC.

Regrettably, we also lost our first classmate last week, who resigned the day we were to start non-radar labs. To most of us, it was a bit of a surprise, as he had been rather silent about some of the mental struggles he had been having trying to decide if this was what he wanted to do as a career. I wish he had stuck with it for a little while longer, as he seemed to have the aptitude to learn the job. However, this is one career that you've definately got to have your heart into as well, or it will just eat you alive. Even in the short period of time I've been in non-radar, this has become very evident. In any event, I wish him well in whatever endeavor he chooses to pursue.

My impressions of the Academy have overall been positive. Basics, like I had been told, was largely a review for a pilot such as myself. Some did struggle a bit at first, but I think most of it was probably people having to shift back into an academic mode. Everyone ended up passing the final and our class average was around 96-97% if I recall correctly.

After basics, we got to spend a day and a half at CAMI (Civil Aero Medical Institute, these are the folks who process pilot's medicals) which is just a few buildings down from where we were at, taking various personality tests and a couple of the sections of the AT-SAT again. We were told that these tests would be used to tweak the AT-SAT and their selection criteria for the psychological exam that is part of the employment screening process. As we were told our first day there, most people working ATC are a bit "off". Evidently they had been rejecting a higher than normal number of applicants when they started using a new type of psych test a few years back, only to find out that students currently at the academy and controllers in the field pretty much tested out very much the same.

En Route training has had its ups and downs so far. Academics has not been that difficult, the rules used in non radar are not too hard to grasp conceptually, but actually applying them is where the true challenge has been. Some problems in the lab go well, others you just get your butt kicked. For me, my biggest challenge has been containing my frustration about my performance when something is pointed out to me and all of a sudden becomes oh-so obvious. Trying to take 20-30 strips of paper and trying to maintain an image in your mind of what is happening over and around a particular fix is a daunting task and I don't think there is anyone who makes it through there without having their ego and confidence bruised at least a couple of times. I think success in this program is largely determined how well you overcome that adversity and just press on.