Air Traffic Management

I have come across a very interesting report which in fact is a testimony of
Henry Krakowski, Chief Operating Officer, Air Traffic Organization
before the House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Aviation on Air Traffic Control Facility Staffing of the United States of America.

This testimony goes into what the FAA is doing in terms of staffing, recruitment and training to ensure that they continuously have the right amount of controllers to ensure services of a high level of quality and services.

One of the key messages that I take from this testimony is that the FAA have learnt a great lesson from the events that lead to and those which followed the controllers’ strike and firing in 1981.

I have experienced myself some of the things mentioned in this testimony, like the problems they have with mass retirements [because there were mass recruitments following 1981 of people of the same age-bracket].  The solutions they found were similar to the ones we had applied in terms of increasing training throughput and decreasing the training time by investing in technology [e.g. simulations]

What is also interesting in this testimony is how the FAA is making efforts to diversify its personnel in terms of gender, social background and interests. I think that some of the European counterparts could learn a lesson from this [whereas others have comparable strategies].

Anyway, I write no more…except for the link: http://www.faa.gov/news/testimony/news_story.cfm?newsId=10238

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How do you motivate students to learn appreciating headings on a radar screen?

Talking with a colleague instructor who has teaching these skills to ab-initio students as part of his tasks seems to have found a good solution:

First of all he uses a radar skills trainer[RST] to introduce the tool instead of putting his students straight in front of a complex simulator.

On top of this following a theoretical introduction of what headings are and when and how they are to be applied, etc., before going to the RST he asks his students to take 2 hours playing with the headings tutors games.

And how does he motivate them even further [the games in themselves are already good motivators] to play and win?  He offers a bar of chocolate to the one with the highest score at the end of the session.

He says it works all the time – and at least at game level the proof is that his students have the high time scores on a central database which stores all scores of the game played on-line.

Pedagogically he says it is much easier to teach heading appreciation this way than it used to be when he used to get them in front of the simulator and run them an exercise.  I believe him!

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