I'm playing catch-up here and finishing a number of half-written posts from the past year or so. I actually started writing this back in July of 2010, and it is now January 2011!

I looked at my wife's blog, and saw that it had been 11 months since I posted here last, yikes! Truthfully, there hadn't been much to report for several months, life on the A side at a Center isn't much to blog about. I decided to break it up into two separate posts since training in the control room is vastly different than that in the lab.

My first three weeks at the center were spent drawing my center and area maps, doing a few CBIs and (my favorite...not!) learning how to reload the flight strip printers. After that, it was about two months of drawing maps again, more CBIs, and quite a few self-paced lessons on military operations, strip marking, approaches, and review on material learned at the Academy. After that, my daily routine was showing up for work, passing out a few weather strips if there were any, and monitoring the operation...for four more months. Yes, I was getting paid to do that, but it is mind numbing to say the least. You really can't do anything useful, the A side position at most ARTCCs these days are a hold over from when there were still flight strips to be distributed to every sector. Today automation (URET) has largely eliminated the use of flight strips, so it is just something that trainees "do" while they are waiting for a Stage III training class. Memphis was rather backed up in the training department when I got here because of training for ERAM (read about Next-Gen in the media?) seizing control of the simulator lab for several months earlier in the year. Previously most people only had to wait maybe 2 months for class, now 6-8 months seems to be the norm unless the stars are in perfect alignment when you get here.

Moving on, I did finally get a class in mid-April. Much of the classroom training was a review from OKC, of course the instructors had their own perspectives on things, but it wasn't any really new material. That was followed by about three and a half weeks (originally scheduled to be two!) of non-radar problems. While I fared a bit better skill wise this time around, save for having to re-take an eval because of a dumb move I made, it was only slightly more enjoyable than non-radar in OKC. That was followed by another week of classroom training and URET refresher, and remote pilot training. Then it was off to the DYSIM lab to start running radar associate problems.

Unlike OKC, radar associated problems in DYSIM ramp up in complexity and volume rather rapidly. However, the first 15 problems you run are (technically) non-evaluated familiarization problems, designed to allow you to be exposed to all of the basic techniques and rules (it is easy to get rusty after 7 months!) you will need for running the instructional problems. By the time I was probably through half of the fam problems I was pretty comfortable with things again. At that point it really came down to building speed (very important in ATC!) and learning new techniques.

After the 12th instructional problem I was notified by the training manager that I had been selected to be accelerated through the remainder of my stage 3 classroom training. To be chosen for this, all of the lab instructors must come together and unanimously agree that the student is not likely to benefit from further simulation training and be given the opportunity to run a 100% complexity problem to test out of the rest of the class and start training on the floor about 3 weeks early. Two others and myself were chosen, and were given one last problem to practice before taking the 100% problem the very next morning. All in all, the problem itself wasn't that bad, it was busy, but fairly straight forward and consisted of most of the regular situations seen on the floor on a day to day basis. Perhaps the biggest thing to overcome was just the pressure of having no fewer than 3 people evaluating you, and all of them had to agree that you passed to move on. Contrast this to previous evaluations (including the PV in OKC) where you had a lone evaluator plugged in with you. Fortunately everything went relatively smoothly, and a few days later I was back on the floor, preparing to train on the D-side on the floor.