Attracting Traffic and Training Controllers

[Gregory Sumner 883451]

Wanted to share an idea and get some feedback from the rest of you. As most of us already know, to generate traffic in our respective ARTCC's, we must staff up the airfields. Pilots fly where ATC is available. Our problems are generally in getting our members to actually get on line and staff up the airspace on any consistant basis. An additional problem is getting instructors and mentors connected with students for training. Our schedules never seem to cooperate with each other and this leads to students not getting their training and possibly even leaving ATC in extreme cases. We all do the best we can but the real world demands can place a barrier to this.

At ZJX we have played with an idea that so far has had mixed results. Being in the early stages, thats to be expected and hopefully participation will improve later on. We'll see, lol. What I came up with is on Sundays, or any other day of your choosing, to hold a training type event. Instructors and Mentors being on line, and allowing student controllers to staff positions that they normally could not without the prescense of an Instructor or Mentor. The student controllers get valuable training time utilizing live traffic, the ARTCC attracts traffic due to having controllers on line. By being a planned event, Instructors and Mentors are also available to provide instruction and guidance to the controllers.

Any feedback is appreciated. Just an attempt to improve our training and our on line status for our customers, (pilots).

[Andrew Doubleday]

Greg - we've been doing this in Chicago for roughly 2 months now - again, with mixed results - but we are working on improving it for everyone's benefit. We hold our event every Wednesday night... out regional night of the week. It's called Training Night at the Zoo. Here's the banner I've made for it.

 

Right now we are staffing up two facilities every week and allowing students to work on position under direct supervision.

 

[Anthony Atkielski 985811]

This sounds like an excellent idea. As a pilot I'd like it to be made clear in the advertising that controllers would be supervised trainings, but it would be fun to fly.