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Old 8th Apr 2009, 14:26
  #15 (permalink)  
HEATHROW DIRECTOR
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Berkshire, UK
Age: 79
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BigEddie. I really am sorry that you took my post so badly because that was far from what I intended. I was an OJTI, both in the UK and abroad, for a goodly part of my working career so I know a bit about training too. In my experience, trainees who were deeply interested in the profession - and especially with where they had been posted - stood a better chance than those who would have preferred to be doing something else.

Learning page after page of MATS parrot fashion may get you through some exams, but most of the job isn't like that; it's a practical, highly skilled, job and not everyone has the ability to do it, no matter how well they know the book. I helped to try and train a very intelligent guy at Heathrow who knew the "book" well but thought that GMC could be done using PERT diagrams. By the time he'd worked out his first course of action following a call from an aircraft, another 20 had called him!

You write: "I have a plan to be an excellent air traffic controller, maybe a few examiners disagree with that so therefore I'm have to make a new plan whats wrong with that?" Nothing wrong with that at all, but have you tried to find out why they disagree with your plan to be an excellent controller? If examiners think you have problems at such an early stage you need to ask why. Maybe they think that your plan won't work?

As I said earlier, I wish you luck and hope all goes well for you. But I also hope that if you make it, you don't chuck it all away in 2-3 years to go and be a Copper, earning about a third of what you could earn as an ATCO.
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