Could you describe the process that a zero experience new hire goes through and the stages/time involved up to being fully checked out?
It all varies facility to facility of course, but here’s the breakdown zero to hero for N90.
Step 1. The Academy in OKC. You’ll be there 4 or 5 months where they teach you useless crap and nothing you’ll actually need to know or how to do anything useful.
Step 2. When you get to N90, the first day aside from HR stuff you are given the facility airspace map. You’ll have 5 work days plus weekend to memorize it and then you’re tested. You have to score above a 90%. It looks like this
Step 3. You’re assigned an Area. N90 has 5 areas; EWR, LGA, JFK, ISP (bunch of jokers level 12 pay level 6 traffic) and Liberty (“high” altitude departure area 10k-17k). You go to class for Flight Data/Clearance Delivery for 10 days.
Step 4. You show up on the ops floor like a deer in headlights. You learn how to pass the flight progress strips to the proper sector, give clearances to aircraft at uncontrolled airports, and a bunch of other really boring stuff. But mostly you’re just the strip bitch. No idea how long it’ll take a no experience person to get checked out on this position but most prior experience people take about a week since it’s not really any different than any where else.
Step 5. Depending on when you showed up, and how many people are in front of you, you may rot in CD/FD for 4 months to a year+ waiting for class. Classes are usually made up of 4 people but sometimes they’ll squeeze a 5th in. Now here’s where I’m a little fuzzy on the process, as they just revamped the training program here and these guys that just hit the floor are the first to go through it. It used to be you’d go to class and then the sim lab for a total of 3 months and then be done with the classroom forever. In the lab you’d run scenarios for every position in your area and have pass/fail skill checks at 50%, 75% and 90%. If you failed any of them twice you washed. Now you just go to class and run sims for 2 positions and do all your skill checks on those 2 positions. In the class you learn your Areas airspace, Standard Operating Procedures, Letters of Agreements, approaches, etc etc
(EWR airspace tail end of an arrival push landing 04R)
Step 6. Whoever survives the lab (average 50-75% pass rate) starts training on the floor talking to real planes. Whenever you work your trainer is plugged in with you and can override you when you go too far down the tubes. You have minimum and maximum hours for each position for certification. When/if you certify on those two positions, you’ll go back to the class/lab for the next two and repeat.
Each Area has different amounts of positions you need to certify on to be considered a Certified Professional Controller (CPC). Pay raises in training comes at 25%, 50%, 75% positions certified and then CPC. EWR has 17 which is the most. Liberty has 5 which is the fewest. Not sure how many the others have.
Time to completely certify varies hugely person to person. Some people (like yours truly) just breeze through it and others take years. There were 2 guys who were training almost a year before I got there and certified a year after me. I don’t know what no experience people can expect as it’s been all prior experience people only until now since the 90’s. I would guesstimate that for no experience hires the average will be at least 3 years. Historically, the washout rate here averages 80% (including in the lab), so for every 100 trainees 20 certify. It remains to be seen if this new training program changes that.
