Intro

Well, this is it.

It's been a long way to get to this point, which took me little over a year to complete, but I made it. In little over a week, I'll be leaving home for Zurich, Switzerland, where I'll have the first part of my EUROCONTROL Air Traffic Controller (hereafter ATCo) Training Course.

I don't know yet how high the workload will be, but I'll try to write a new blog from time to time to keep you up to speed on how I am doing over there. The reason I'm writing in English is the international character EUROCONTROL and aviation in general have.

To give you an example of this character, there are 8 people to start the EUROCONTROL ATCo Course #55:
- 2 are Belgian (both male)
- 2 are Dutch (both male)
- 1 is French (male)
- 2 are German (both male)
- 1 is Irish (female)

The entire first part of the training will be given under the watchful eye of Skyguide, the Swiss Air Traffic Control (hereafter ATC) agency.

Those who are succesful in the first part, will then have to move to the Institute of Air Navigation Services (hereafter IANS) in Luxembourg for further training. Here, this training will be given by EUROCONTROL employees, as will it be in the Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre (hereafter MUAC) in Maastricht, The Netherlands, where we will have the final stage of our training if succesful in Luxembourg.

The schedule for these parts, is as follows:
18 October - 28 January : Zurich, Switzerland
31 January - 4 July : Luxembourg, Luxembourg
12 July - unknown: Maastricht, The Netherlands

Those of us who will have succesfully gone through all parts of the course, will be employed as a qualified ATCo in the MUAC after the training. Even though the exact date will depend on personal progress , graduation day is expected to be somewhere around 2 years and 8 months after starting the course, which will be approximately Summer 2012.

That's about what I can think of right now for this blog. Feel free to leave remarks and/or questions under any of my blogs.

Kind regards,
Mathias