Ask Madden

yo yo...training is going REAL well. I like my trainer a lot, I did request him becuase I get along with him well and also I like the way he trains. He's very hands off but explains when he needs to. We've done over 20 hours in a little over a week, and i heard him talking to one of the supervisors today saying how him and my supervisor don't want to take me to the max amount of hours, which is great. And i even heard them discussing getting me another class to start training on another sector, which is also great. More certifications more pay raises. I think part of the reason they don't feel they need to take me to max hours is because in my 20 hours we've seen SO many different things, pretty much everything there is. Today I even got to see a potential "bad situation" that I got to fix.

Also two days ago a pilot asked the controller next to me the score of the dodgers game.

yo yo...im watching glenn beck right now and its really interesting...he's having a big town hall meeting with about 50 doctors of all practices, and some medical students too, and they're talking about the healthcare debate. It's actually pretty interesting, because they all have different opinions. Some are disagreeing with each other on some points, some points most seem to agree. I really don't know what to make of all this. But i do know one thing. The last doctor that spoke just before commercial made the point that no one with any medical expertise is drafting this bill behind closed doors.

yo yo...so yesterday at work was a total clusterfuck, let me explain

normally at LAX its in a west configuration, meaning you land to the west, and take off to the west. There are two sets of parallel runways(see pic), with the outside ones for landing, the inside ones for taking off. occaisonly, if weather conditions are bad enough they will move to east configuration, but it happens rarely, maybe a couple times a year. When it happens all the approaches change, airspace changes, everything is different.




so i was working a sector, my 2nd day training, and we saw the management people huddling together and they decided to go to east. So my instructor too over because he had to put all my planes in holding and it was very complicated. Then they came and said nevermind we're gonna stay west, so he tried to fix everything and set eveyrone back up for normal operations. THEN they finally decided to go east, and we had all these planes in holding. Everyone working is trying to find out what the hell we're doing because they wouldn;t make a decision. It was nuts. Everyone joked with me the rest of the day "hey interesting 2nd day eh?" It was pretty cool to see though, but pretty scary since once we went to east i had no idea about procedures or airspace. Its also weird because they go to it so rarely if your days off align just right you may never see it.

yo yo...im at work now gettin ready to go home in an hour watching kill bill in the break room. Today I talked to my first airplanes! I started training today and it's nice to finally do things besides pass strips of paper around, got in 3 hours of training! Hours are important since the more hours you get, the quicker you get certified and the quicker you get pay raises. It was kind of scary at first to be hoenst because we had our pre trainign meeting with my lead trainer and my supervisor, and they said maybe we'd get to train tonight. I went into the control room and my trainer was sitting at the scope and said ok plug in, i plugged in and he just started giving me the pre position breifing (basically tell people what's going on in the sector before you switch people) and i was off and running. It was kind fo scary that he had that much faith in me, and he didnt even hover over me like some trainers do, he gave me my breifing and watched from another scope 10 feet away, i felt all by myself, it was scary but exciting! I experienced a few diff thigns today, aircraft with radios cuttign in adn out, readback errors, korean pilots, british pilots(who i love, they are so precise, tho i hear the asians are actually real good pilots, just bad speakers) and even had a few women pilots! I was honestly expecting to take a long time to check out because of getting little hours but im pleasantly surprised with how important they seem to take training so i hopefully i wont be poor for a while!

yo yo....so things just got a whole lot better at work. Our new contract went into effect yesterday(except the pay changes which go into effect jan 1st). Our dress code is now pretty much anything, shorts, t-shirts, hats, flip flops. You could feel the morale the next day. Its pretty sweet to wear whatever you want to work.
Today there was a union meeting and the rep from our facility was just telling people some stuff their working on. He appaerently has a pretty good relationship with senators boxer and feinstein(CA senators) since our facility is at the forefront of air traffic control shortages. Our facility is the busiest, with the worst staffing crisis, so most attention is paid to ours. So he told a story how recently about 30 minutes before Randy Babbit was supposed to be confirmed as the new FAA admin our rep met with barbara boxer and she asked him how things have improved at our facility, he said they really haven't. He said about 15 minutes later he was getting all these calls from union higher ups asking what he said, the the DOT secretary wanted to know to. Apparently because he said that boxer told babbit that he won't be getting confirmed, sot hen babbit made a promise to fix our facility. Its pretty cool actually.
Im done training in the lab, go to the floor to talk to real airplanes this week. Excited, except dreading having to talk to asians.