On Tue, 09 Mar 2004 12:48:42 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote:

Chicago Center has trainees, lots of 'em.

Great. You're not inspiring any confidence here, Newps... ;-)

Please tell me that before you can become an ATC trainee at Chicago Center,
you have to first be a controller at some other backwater part of the
country, right?

Or, at the very least, tell me they first assign the trainees to my neck of
the woods, where traffic is relatively light?

The US Navy apparently uses Whitbey Island NAS in Washington State as a
training ground for new controllers. A number of years back, I was riding
shotgun in a Helio Courier carrying an experimental satellite camera. We
were running tests on it just outside the Class C airspace at Whitbey. The
plane was owned by Boeing and operated by the Boeing Flight Test
organization; the pilot was actually the chief of flight test for several
of the company models. Because of the proximity to the Class C, the pilot
established comm with NAS Whitbey so they'd know what he was up to.

Anyway, we had a combination of operations just outside the Class C, the
moral equivalent of an old, grizzled, test pilot, a test grid we had to fly
by GPS, and newbie controllers who apparently believed if we were on their
scope and talking to them, they could tell us where to fly. They seemed a
bit confused when we kept telling them, "no."

Ron Wanttaja