On January 8th, 1991, I flew to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I was arriving a few days in advance of my class date, the 11th, to find a place to live while I was attending "The Screen" for air traffic controllers, where I'd have a 57% chance of passing.
You've heard the story of "look at the person to your right- one of you is not going to pass this course"? Well, that's exactly what the guy said to us, sitting in the FAA's auditorium. Most of us had quit jobs to give up three months of our life for what was essentially a 50-50 proposition. Of course, every single one of us probably hoped it was the other guy that bombed out and believed we were going to be the guy that passed the course.
A bit about OKC. I didn't like it much, unfortunately.
I don't know what comes to your mind when you think "Oklahoma City", but here's what comes to my mind having been there twice (once for 3 months, once for 3 weeks)... flat, brown, dry, dusty, windy, and really nice people. The people are the saving grace of OKC; other than that, in my opinion there's no redeeming values there whatsoever.
To be fair, both of the times I was there (at the FAA Academy, located on the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center campus) for some training, it was winter. I've heard it's much prettier in the spring and fall. Summers, I've heard, tend to be hot- and there's the matter of tornadoes, too.
The MMAC is one of the bigger employers in OKC. It's located on the OKC airport. Thanks to the weather, there's lots of underground tunnels connecting the buildings; this keeps you out of the worst of the weather during the winters and summers, and provides a nice hidey-hole when the tornado sirens go off.
The day after I arrived, I left the hotel to find everything coated with about an inch of ice from an ice storm. I was looking at the various apartments that are for rent by FAA students. There's a little sub-industry around MMAC for this, providing apartments equipped with everything you need for a short-term stay- dishes, furniture, linens, etc. Buy some food and bring some soap and shampoo, and you're ready to go.
Now, about The Screen. The way the FAA got air traffic controllers, up until 1992, was a filtering-out process.
The agency would offer free screening tests from time to time at locations all around the nation. This was a pencil-and-paper test that was designed to identify people with the types of thinking and skill sets that lend themselves towards being a good air traffic controller.
To be eligible to be hired, you had to pass this test; you had to be a US citizen; and by the time you got hired, you couldn't have reached your 31st birthday. (The age thing is still a requirement for the job; there's plenty of proof that the older you are when hired, the less successful you are at the training process, and this age discrimination is legal for that reason.)
If you got a passing score on the test, you got placed onto a listing, ranked by the score. Then they'd call you in for an interview, have you fill out a long application for a moderately comprehensive background and security check (you get a security clearance for many ATC jobs in the FAA), and put you onto a second list from which they'd offer slots in The Screen at the academy.
Only a small percentage- I've heard less than 10%- of people taking the test get to the academy. (I can't find a reference for this, but I'm sure there's something online somewhere.)
The Screen was a grind. Lasting about three months, you probably had to quit your job to attend. This wasn't much of an issue for me, since I was working for a ski resort- an industry where they're very used to people coming and going with short notice. My boss at Crystal even strongly encouraged me to go, knowing a good job when she saw it.
Historically, only 57% of the people that went to the screen would pass. My class was right along those lines; of 18 students in my "section", only 10 passed, and 8 were sent home, out of a job. To give up three months of your life in an all-involving process, only to fail, is pretty crushing.
The Screen had two main parts. The first was an academic section where they taught us everything we needed in terms of basic ATC. In theory (and in practice) you could come to OKC with zero knowledge or skills in ATC or aviation, and still pass The Screen.
There were occasional sub-part tests, and then a comprehensive test at the end of the academic section that was worth 20 points towards your overall score in The Screen. The magic number was 70.00; that or greater, you passed; less than that, the FAA thanked you for your service and sent you packing.
Then we entered the problems. These were exercises in ATC 101- using just paper strips and the famous "double-ender" pencil, which had a red and and a black (or blue) end.
You walk into a large room. Down each of the long sides are big boards that slant away, vertically but tilted at an angle. They're filled with plastic holders for the strips.
Here's a picture that's similar... from maybe the 50s era, but flight strips are flight strips:
There's a printer sitting at each of the 9 workstations down each side. There's high chairs, on castors, and spots for the controllers' headsets to be plugged into a rudimentary communication system.
We would file into the classroom, taking turns being the controller and being the "remote" operator for the problem. The high chairs would have instructors in them; these were typically retired controllers who were working for a private contractor. They had clipboards and listened to everything that the student said, and wrote down all the stuff the student got wrong. (The clipboards were usually filled.)
We'd sit there for a minute, and then the printers would explode with the strips. We loaded the strips into the holders as fast as possible, because we only had 5 or 8 minutes or something until the problem began, and the faster you got them loaded and sorted, the sooner you could start trying to find the conflicts and solve them.
Then the clock would start and the problem began. We'd start spitting out clearances to separate the "airplanes"; the remotes would pretend to be pilots or other control facilities, and the instructors would sit and watch, occasionally walking over to the remote to tell them to do something or speed them up somehow.
We ran problems for 3 or 4 weeks. Each problem lasted 35-45 minutes, with a 10-15 minute followup for the controller, while the remotes all went outside to gossip about what an idiot their controller had been. Of course, the next hour, the remotes would trade places with the controllers and the roles were reversed. Sometimes you'd run a problem that you'd already seen as a remote and you'd STILL screw it up.
After two weeks, we'd have our first "graded" problems. The gradeds were even more tense than the practice problems, which were pretty intense anyway. The first two (the "10s", as they were problems #10A and #10B) weren't worth as much of your score, but still awfully important.
The overall problems counted for a total of 60 possible points in your overall score for The Screen, so even if you were a whiz in academics and carried 19 or 20 points there, you couldn't pass the overal course without doing reasonably well on the problems.
For the graded problems, the remotes were under strict instructions to NOT do anything that might influence the person- no tone of voice on clearance readbacks, quick and efficient handling of the problem, and so forth. If there was a student who had trouble keeping up, they might choose to put an instructor in as the remote, so the person taking the test got a fair shake.
The instructor who watched you on a graded problem was one who hadn't seen you in action before, thereby serving as a blank slate and giving you a hopefully fair, neutral evaluation of strictly your performance. During the practice problems, you usually worked with the same set of instructors, who could notice trends and give you some feedback to help you get better at what you were doing.
The lab was usually pretty stinky with nervous sweat for the gradeds. (Ironically, as I write about this experience, "The Imperial March" from Star Wars is playing on my computer.) You'd file in and run the problem as best you could.
They'd alternate the problems so the students sitting on either side of you weren't running the same problem you were, but occasionally you'd be able to hear someone a couple of seats down running the same one. You'd hear them give a clearance and have the same guy, and it might throw you off because what they did was different than your plan. Did you screw up? Are they just being stupid? Wait, who are they talking to NOW? That guy isn't a problem, is he? Oh shit oh dear, did I miss something and just crash two airplanes together? FUCK! Now I lost my place... what was I going to do with that guy? Did I coordinate that correctly? Why is the instructor writing something down? Dammit, I know how to give that clearance, and I just screwed up the phraseology and lost points...
Well, you can imagine the stress. It's really brutal, to be honest... and in my opinion, it's exactly what we needed. ATC is not for the faint of heart; when the pilot suddenly calls you on the frequency, shouting about engine failure and obviously panicked, you have to be able to take it. If you can't handle it when it's for pretend in the lab, you're certainly not going to be able to handle it for real.
Instead of running four total problems a day, on graded day we only ran two- one where you were the student, and one where you were the remote. The rest of the time was nervous laughter, talking to the people who ran the same problem, and beating yourself up for all the stuff you did wrong.
Then we ran another week of practice problems, and then Hell Week started. We had 4 graded problems on 4 consecutive days, then a weekend off, then the final exam which was a combination of academics and air traffic situations; that final counted towards another 20 points of your overall score.
So it was:
Academics test: 20 points
Graded problems: 60 points
Final exam: 20 points
Going into the final, you knew exactly how high you had to score to hit that magical "70″ for the course. The lucky bastards only needed to score a 25% or 30% on the test (for 5 or 6 points) to get above 70, but most people needed at least 40% to 60% to get another 8, 10, maybe 12 points of the 20 available. I was doing okay because I'd pulled an awesome problem at one point, just had everything wired on one of the gradeds, and only needed a 45% for 9 points to pass the course.
We had practice tests, made up of stolen former versions that were passed along from class to class, recopied dozens of times. We'd take those tests to see how well we were ready for the final. I knew I'd score well on the final, getting 75% or higher on each practice test, so on final day I was feeling good and loose and knocked out somewhere in the 80s for an easy pass.
The day after the final, the scores came back. Our class instructor delivered them and of course most of us had a decent idea, at that point, how we had done. There were only a few people who were on the bubble, and a couple had been mathematically eliminated prior to the final due to poor performance on the problems.
We had one guy who, as it turned out, had gone home to Texas over the weekend to his grandfather's funeral. His grandpa had basically raised him and of course this blew him apart for studying, but he tried to tough it out and not tell anyone. His final score for the course was 69.8ish; basically if he'd gotten like one or two more questions correct on the final, he'd have passed.
We found out about it and told the instructor. They called him at his apartment, where he was packing, and made something up about paperwork and got him back to the academy, then gave him a retake on a graded problem (his grandpa had been sick during the final four graded problems). He did well, passed, and as far as I know is a controller today.
A couple of other people had good-enough excuses to get retakes on some gradeds. Most managed to get the score they needed to pass the overall course, but that could be a little suspect since usually the instructor would ask "so what kind of score do you need to pass?" after a retake. Basically, you couldn't get a retake unless you had a pretty good reason for bombing out the first time... and of course your instructor had to like you. This was my first introduction to the "good old boys" club method of operations that permeates the FAA. (It's not just men, either- my section's lead instructor was a woman, and women play the game in the FAA as much as the men do.)
I passed The Screen. I was on my way to officially becoming an air traffic controller and talking to airplanes for a living. We had a 2 or 3 week follow-on course, but it was basically just decompression, more basic studies in aviation, aeronautics, physics of flight, navigation, and so forth... then they sent us back to our facilities. Which is where I'll pick up in Part III!
This is a multi-part series cross-posted from my blog, A Blue Eyed Buddhist
You can also read the other parts here on DailyKos:
Part I
Part II, which was featured as a diary rescue! Thanks!
Part III
Part IV
or by going to my blog and clicking on the "FAA/NATCA" category.