Pre-course, week 1

So, yeah. I’m well into my first week of ATC 101 (that’s Air Traffic Control for you people who don’t care much for acronyms in the ATS-universe. By the way, ATS means Air Traffic Service. And acronym is the initial letters of the words in a phrase. I know you probably know/would have guessed it, but I like acting like a know-it-all. Boosts my EGO. Ok. Ok. I should get back to the blog).

It’s held at Røyken ATCC (I’ll give you a list over the acronyms at the end, ok?) where my big sister used to work! Figure that. And people still remember her too. Aaaaw… So there’s been a few certain amount of “You have to be Rigmors sister”. Who? Me? Living in a shadow? No… I just look like her, picked the same vocation as her and hang out at her old workplace. It’s… yeah… never mind.

The funny thing is that since I’m already in the ATS-family as an AFIS-officer people probably have slightly higher expectations of me. And I have even higher expectations of me, at least in the beginning, which is nice, cuz it makes me motivated to study. Not that this pre-course is heavy or anything. It’s pretty light. You’re just supposed to get a feeling of what you’re getting into. What’s expected of you as an air traffic controller. But I kinda got my confidence hurt today when one of the instructors were showing pictures of airplanes and we had to guess what airplane it was. Suddenly when nobody knew the answer to one of the plane, I knew it!

Cut to scene:

Me, smiling knowingly and confident.

Instructor:          “Ah! The AFIS-officer obviously knows the answer.”
Me:                      “That’s a Dash 8!”
Instructor:          “Correct! Do you know if it’s the 100 or 300 series?”

Duh! I’ve only been looking at them the last 3.5 years of my life!

Me:                      “The 100-series me thinks.”
Instructor:          “No. It’s the 300.”

*Facepalm* In my defence, which is really not that great, the picture had a weird angle. And I’m sticking to it. Plus, if I had seen it in real life I’m confident very fairly certain I would know the difference.  But other than that small incident, I’m doing pretty well.

Also, we got to visit the American Embassy in Oslo the other day! Wow. It's like a Norwegian high-risk prison! And the people you had to talk to in there about the visa sat behind bulletproof windows (I'm not really sure if it was bulletproof, but it's more fun that way. Or intimidating). As luck would have it, I looked innocent enough and got myself a visa! Yey! 

In other related news, the quarters are excellent, the food is excellent, the people are excellent and the course is excellent. I'm having a good time =). On Monday we'll be leaving for Ørlandet, which is a military airport outside of Trondheim, where we will spend our second week of the pre-course.

Explanations (also known as acronyms in ATS for dummies):

ATC                      Air Traffic Control

ATS                       Air Traffic Service

ATCC                    Air Traffic Control Centre

AFIS                      Aerodrome Flight Information Service

Consider yourself slightly educated in the thrilling world known as AVIATION!