Do you think that you could “control” an aircraft? How about 15 at one time? Join Airman 1st Class Quion Lowe to see if he really has what it takes to be a Holloman Air Force Base air traffic controller in the second edition of Air Force Jobs!
Transcript
[Trainer] Yeah, our runway two-five is unavailable. This heavy C-17 just exploded also.
This is just not my day.
All right, so if you look over here, do you see your heavy C-17 on fire?
Yes.
All right, what’s up everybody? Welcome to today’s edition of Air Force Jobs. Today we’re featuring the Air Traffic Controllers, a very essential job to the Air Force mission, and I’m A1C Lowe, and I’m gonna give this a go. So obviously that whole simulation was pretty difficult. So how much more difficult does it get or how do you make it harder than that?
So in your simulation, you had a total of like four aircraft on frequencies, which obviously we tried to rep it up for you.
[A1C Lowe] Obviously?
[SrA Gonzalez] Obviously, yeah, you had two—
[A1C Lowe] That was pretty hard for me.
[SrA Gonzalez] Yeah, I put two emergencies in there for you to work, but usually before trainees get full up, they tend to work, or they’re expected to work about 10-15 aircraft if not more. Maybe in an emergency, whatever we could throw at them.
How’d I do?
Uh, I mean, there’s better controllers.
[A1C Lowe] So on a typical day, what are your duties like?
[SrA Gonzalez] So we come in 15 minutes before our shift actually starts for our pre-duty familiarization brief, and after that, we jump into position. If you’re a trainer, you jump in with your trainee, get them some live time, and then after that we come down to the simulator and get him some training there. But we’re usually, at least 99.9% of the time we’re usually in position or training somebody. This career field is very training oriented.
And then stop arrivals one six.
What? So, what do you think is the most challenging part of this job?
The most challenging part of this job would definitely be whenever you have 10 plus aircraft in your pattern and you have them all sequenced, all ready to go, now all of a sudden you have a random emergency that pops up or you know, a pilot in training might not be too familiar with the pattern, and that could throw a wrench in our sequence, so we have to adjust everybody around that and then change up our whole plan sometimes, and that’s probably the most influence, because you do have to think on your feet and make quick decision and correct decisions, ’cause lives are definitely in your hands.
Yeah, I can’t even imagine, ’cause I was struggling with the jargon and all the phrases so how long would you say that took you to get that down?
So, definitely going through tech school definitely helped me out, I guess, introduced me to that certain set of jargon. You know, it just takes a lot of repetition and a lot of practicing how to say certain phraseology with your fellow trainee, your leader, or with your trainers. I would say maybe within a couple weeks to a month you know, you’d probably have it all down, but sometimes they’ll introduce new phraseology to you as you progress so you have to learn that as well. So, you’re constantly learning that.
Okay, would you say I was closer to getting it down in a week, or closer in a month?
I’d probably say a month.
All right, let’s turn this up, it’s too easy.
[SrA Gonzalez] All right.
Yeah, let’s start turning it up and you try your best.
It’s not easy at all.