I'm back

Hey

As you all know, it's been a long time already. Again. Reason this time: studying.

The IANS has already proven to give me more work than Skyguide (no offence there). As soon as we got here, we were starting the course, with subjects like Human Performance, Law, Navigation, Equipment, ... Also, there was a lot of studying to be done on the LOP-test, as it was a requirement to pass it before we could start in the simulator.

On the first go last week, 6 of 8 passed it and I wasn't among them. With 76%, I was just 4% short of the required 80%, which meant I had another week of studying ahead. The resit-exam, and also the deadline actually, was two days ago as sim was planned to start yesterday. For the resit, 80% wasn't enough anymore. To prove that you knew your stuff, 90% was the requirement to pass it. Fortunately, the extra week gave me the time to catch up on things and that resulted in a resit-score of 93%. The other person who failed the test initially did a tremendous job with 98% on the resit-exam.

And that of course meant we were all allowed in the simulator yesterday and have a go at the controls that are a (near-to) exact replica of the real MASUAC-control stations. Very impressive, I must say. Screens with a resolution of 2000 * 2000 pixels, I'd like to have them for my computer. If only they weren't so bloody expensive. Just one costs about 30.000 euro. Better not throw your mouse into it, when you get frustrated. ;-)

Yesterday, we just used a basic exercise to get used to the interface and the input system. Today, we are already starting to resolve conflict situation by vectoring. It's still a bit slow, as there is a lot more to be done now, than we had to do before (instruct, put it in the system, scan, pre-scan, plan, conflict searching etc), but I'm sure we'll become masters in it, once we get used to the HMI (Human Machine Interface) and the exact correct working methodology.

That's actually just about the basic quick run-through of what's been happening here in the past weeks. I know it's not a lot, but in reality there's not much to tell. I just have class, go home, study a bit, do some homework, relax a bit, go to bed, get up and repeat the same process. Luckily, it might change a bit now, with simulator starting and the days are getting shorter (today, I started at 10 and finish at 2, for example).


As the days are shorter, I might be back faster as well, though I actually think I'll have less to tell then. Most of what we are doing from this point on, will be simulator runs (300 coming up in the next months) and I'm not sure if I'm at liberty to discuss that in this blog. I guess I'll have to ask someone.

Again, if you have comments, suggestions, questions, anything related to the blog/training, leave something in the box below. Maybe I can get this blog alive more by giving (short) answers to questions instead of having to come up with stories of what I'm doing all the time.

Speak to you later.