Let's Argue About Enroute Evals

KTreu42 said:
I had 2 situations on my first eval that we never had on problems. Both of them, I made the correct decision on, as we had seen all of the elements of the situations and I made educated guesses, but we had not seen the exact situations I had. Probably a good evaluation method, tbh... Can you use what you've learned in the past to understand how to resolve a relatively novel situation.
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Atc is applying rules to new situations. That’s what it is in real life
 
I think what made the evals significantly more difficult than practice problems was the environment. It’s deathly quiet in the lab and during the problem you get literally no feedback from the evaluator on how you’re doing. That is very different from the retired controllers that want to tell you how dumb you are every mistake you make. It’s just mentally a different game during the evals.

Also, I had an issue with how the instructors taught. They ‘scare’ you into not making a fatal error, ie; DM’ing the wrong aircraft due to similar sounding callsigns. ‘Don’t do it or you fail!!’

I pushed them very hard for them to finally give me an answer on HOW TO FIX IT. Don’t just throw your arms up and say ‘welp I’m fucked.’ After hearing ‘just don’t do it’ over and over I finally got them to teach me how to freeze the data block. Although...step one is identifying the error.
 
Papa_Mike said:
I think what made the evals significantly more difficult than practice problems was the environment. It’s deathly quiet in the lab and during the problem you get literally no feedback from the evaluator on how you’re doing. That is very different from the retired controllers that want to tell you how dumb you are every mistake you make. It’s just mentally a different game during the evals.

Also, I had an issue with how the instructors taught. They ‘scare’ you into not making a fatal error, ie; DM’ing the wrong aircraft due to similar sounding callsigns. ‘Don’t do it or you fail!!’

I pushed them very hard for them to finally give me an answer on HOW TO FIX IT. Don’t just throw your arms up and say ‘welp I’m fucked.’ After hearing ‘just don’t do it’ over and over I finally got them to teach me how to freeze the data block. Although...step one is identifying the error.
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The other thing is everyone is running different problems. It’s easy sub conciously to hear the dude next to you making a point out and then scanning for it.
 
DankVectorz said:
quick climbs are routine at many places
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This. Even tankers can jump the fuck up if they want too. You have less than a minute to coordinate with other sectors around/above you. It just sets the foundation for an approach control calling you and wanting an altitude to give the hot shots so they can go play.
 
Dolan said:
They're also out of the question at many places, carry on I guess?
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sure, but kinda invalidates the argument they shouldn’t be on an eval because they’re not applicable to real life. Basicsllg any place with fighters or trainers is going to have to deal with quick climbs on the reg.
 
DankVectorz said:
sure, but kinda invalidates the argument they shouldn’t be on an eval because they’re not applicable to real life. Basicsllg any place with fighters or trainers is going to have to deal with quick climbs on the reg.
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This. Doesn’t have to be blue angels either. Even tankers can giddy on up there to where if you don’t get coordination or a plan done in 30 seconds, you’re delaying them.
 
Figured I'd shimmy on in here, we get every fighter there is, and E6s, C5s, C17s etc etc and an occasional U2 coming through, everyone gets offered unrestricted climbs to the flight levels and everyone gets approved...mostly because it's awesome watching a flight of F22s burn it off the departure end and have the supe answering phone calls about noise for the next 30 minutes...
 
Idk what it is about little planes always wanting to fly with the real pilots, but I had a fighter request an unrestricted climb into the FLs. I got that all coordinated, cleared and switched the fighter. Then here comes Bob in his Cherokee.....”tower, request unrestricted climb....”. Approved let’s see this climb lol. Spoiler alert, looked like a normal departure ?.
 
I love watching unrestricted climbs, but they’re not near as cool watching them on radar. I absolutely love watching F18s, 15s, 16s, and 22s turn up the afterburners and disappear. I watched a C-17 do an unrestricted climb to 15,000 and was super impressed with its climb capability. I assume it was empty or close to it, but it was climbing at an insanely steep angle that looked like it would fall out of the sky.
 
AnyTrafficPleaseAdvise said:
I love watching unrestricted climbs, but they’re not near as cool watching them on radar. I absolutely love watching F18s, 15s, 16s, and 22s turn up the afterburners and disappear. I watched a C-17 do an unrestricted climb to 15,000 and was super impressed with its climb capability. I assume it was empty or close to it, but it was climbing at an insanely steep angle that looked like it would fall out of the sky.
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Nothing cooler then when they’re doing night flying and all you see is a 25’ blue flame streaking down the Runway and then just going vertical

Dolan said:
Under a 10 MIT STAR? Color me suspicious. Or do you now actually mean a busy sector
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All I was saying is that quick climbs and unrestricted climbs are something that are very common in many places, and that the argument you’d never see it in real life is false.
 
DankVectorz said:
All I was saying is that quick climbs and unrestricted climbs are something that are very common in many places, and that the argument you’d never see it in real life is false.
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I guess I did come across that way. In my area it's out of the question in the airports we give clearances from because they're pretty busy, between a couple major airports with all of the traffic going in and coming out of them, and there's a ton of restricted airspace in every direction.

Now if it's dead and the airspace is cold by all means knock yourself out.
 
I'd say obviously nerves would be the reason for evals being "hard".. for mine I remember my last radar eval missing a Point Out climbing to high after it felt like 10 of then happened that problem.. that was my only "major" mistake I made in any 3

Any mistake I made I remember recognizing that I had made it and just moved on. I never asked the people who failed but I'd bet they had issues moving on from their mistakes
 
AnyTrafficPleaseAdvise said:
I love watching unrestricted climbs, but they’re not near as cool watching them on radar. I absolutely love watching F18s, 15s, 16s, and 22s turn up the afterburners and disappear. I watched a C-17 do an unrestricted climb to 15,000 and was super impressed with its climb capability. I assume it was empty or close to it, but it was climbing at an insanely steep angle that looked like it would fall out of the sky.
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Yah they’re awesome on radar. Or when a fighter does a 360 for spacing. In 3 radar hits they’ll be north, south, north
 
Looking to ask some questions about the radar portion of academy. Please message me if you've been to academy since it's reopened! (Post-COVID)
 

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