Level Three: Your First Facility — Where Learning Becomes Reality
"The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning." - Pele
That's from Pelé — soccer legend, and one of my all-time favorite athletes. I actually got to meet him once. I shook his hand. That was it. To be clear: I got to meet him. He did not get to meet me.
But that quote has stuck with me for a long time, and it fits exactly where we are in this series.
We've walked through Level One — everything before the Academy.
We've walked through Level Two — the Academy itself, and I know a lot of you came through CTI, Advanced ATC, or the military instead, and I hope you pulled something out of that one anyway, because there's a lot in there that carries over.
This week we're at Level Three.
Your first facility. This is where learning becomes reality.
And here's the part nobody wants to hear on graduation day: the Academy is difficult, and passing it feels amazing precisely because it's so difficult — but passing it doesn't make you an air traffic controller.
A lot of students carry around the idea that if they can just get through the Academy, they'll finally be a controller. The reality is that passing the Academy earns you one thing. It earns you the right and the opportunity to go to the next level. You did something hard, and your reward is the chance to try something even harder.
What Actually Changes at Level Three
Doesn't matter which option you went through. Doesn't matter which facility you're headed to. Here's what's different.
The Academy is about concepts. Procedures. Phraseology. Running scenario after scenario and squeezing as much learning out of each one as you can until you pass and you graduate.
Your first facility is not simulated.
Yes, you'll get simulator time.
You'll get training scenarios.
But when you plug in and start OJT — on-the-job training — that is live traffic.
Real airplanes.
Flown by real pilots.
Carrying real people.
And that changes everything.
What your facility is going to teach you is that you have to adapt to the traffic. You have to be able to change your plan midstream when the traffic tells you to.
And you're going to discover something that the Academy only hinted at: you cannot memorize ATC. You cannot memorize your way through training. You couldn't really do it at the Academy either, but at your first facility it's flat-out impossible.
You have to be able to take what your trainers are telling you and apply it.
That's the whole game.
On top of that, you've got local procedures. Local airspace. And every facility has its own culture — its own way of doing things, its own personality. Every facility is different. You have to learn all of it and adapt to all of it at the same time you're trying to become a CPC.
Your first facility is where all of it comes together for the first time.
The Biggest Shock: You're Starting Over
This is the one I see hit Academy graduates hardest.
You're starting over.
Day one.
Again.
In a lot of ways it feels exactly like your first day at the Academy.
New building you've never been in.
New faces.
Nobody knows you.
And here's the thing — that's just how it is, and that's how it's going to be every single time you change facilities for the rest of your career. You're going to be the new guy or the new girl. That's the deal.
A lot of graduates walk in thinking, I passed the Academy, the hard part's over.
Then day two arrives with new maps, new procedures, new expectations — sometimes enormous expectations — new instructors, new supervisors, new management.
It is a lot to take in.
Walk In Humble
This isn't usually a problem with Academy graduates, but I'm going to say it anyway because it matters that much.
Go into your first facility incredibly humble.
I don't care what you scored at the Academy. And I can guarantee you they don't care either.
They see Academy graduates come through all the time, and as far as they're concerned every single one of you scored about a 71.
So if you were one of the people who scored a 95 or a 98 — I think 98 is the highest anyone's ever put up going through the En Route Academy — it doesn't matter. And if you scraped through at 70.01, it doesn't matter either.
You all start over. You all start at the same point.
Go in as a sponge.
Go in wanting to take in everything, learn everything.
You're not going to learn everything in your first few months — nobody does — but that has to be the attitude. And make sure everybody who comes in contact with you can see it.
Not because you're saying it. Because you're doing it.
At your first facility, it's all about what you do, how you carry yourself, and how much effort you put in. That's what determines how your coworkers see you and how they respond to you.
The Six Drivers at Level Three
Driver One: Purpose.
This matters even more here than it did at the Academy.
You are going to have highs and you are going to have lows, and when you hit those lows you need your purpose solid and in front of you.
Write it down.
Why are you willing to keep pushing?
Training is long. It gets frustrating. It gets emotional.
Your purpose is what keeps you moving forward on the days when you can't seem to do anything right.
Driver Two: Plan.
Your facility will have a training plan for you. Early on it'll feel like they're just dumping things on you — here are the maps, learn them, draw them. And believe me, they're a lot harder than the Academy maps.
That goes for towers and TRACONs. You're learning approach plates on top of it.
They have a plan.
But you need a plan too.
How many hours are you studying? When are you reading through the SOPs and the LOAs?
I'm at a contract tower and I think we have seven LOAs.
A decently busy tower will have eight to ten.
A TRACON has one with every Podunk tower in the airspace.
At a center — oh my. LOAs everywhere.
And you can't just know they exist, you have to understand them.
That takes a plan.
Daily goals.
Weekly goals.
Monthly goals.
But here's the good news: this is not the Academy.
It is not twelve weeks of pure terror.
You do not have to give up your family or your entire social life to get through your first facility.
You do have to manage your time well, because you have to keep moving forward — but you have time.
Driver Three: Phraseology.
Every facility has its own phraseology.
Honestly, every controller does — all of it inside the 7110.65, but everybody's got their own read on what's real phraseology, what you can get away with, and what you can't.
When I say phraseology at this level, I really mean all the details.
Facility-specific techniques.
How they want you to work traffic.
How they want you to communicate with each other, on the line and off.
You will not be left hanging in the wind trying to come up with your own interpretation of the .65.
Your trainers will tell you. They'll give you more than a few tips on exactly what they want.
Just expect there to be a ton of it.
You thought the Academy was a lot of information — and it was.
Your first facility is more. Don't let that surprise you.
Driver Four: Practice.
Repetition becomes critical here, and so does observation.
You're going to have a lot of opportunity to watch your coworkers work traffic. Find the ones who are obviously at the top of their game — usually the ones with fifteen, twenty-plus years in.
Sit down.
Listen to how they work.
Watch how they work.
Ask questions when it won't disturb them.
You won't understand a lot of it at first.
You're new.
That's fine.
Keep watching, keep listening, keep learning — and your willingness to do that will show.
You'll get simulator time too.
Bigger facilities have them; smaller ones might not.
When I got to Love Field in Dallas there was no simulator, and when I finally got to the radar position my trainer took me over to the TRACON so we could use theirs to practice.
The opportunities are there if you want them.
And at the end of every training day, you and your trainer sit down and go over it. Sometimes you'll get to watch exactly what you did on a replay and talk through what you might have done differently.
This is serious training.
This is where you become a controller.
Driver Five: Picture.
This is one of your biggest growth areas.
You move from memorizing procedures to seeing traffic — and then from seeing traffic to anticipating conflicts.
You scratched the surface of this at the Academy.
At your first facility you take it to a much deeper level.
You start to understand not just what they told you to do, but why.
Because it works.
You become the chess master who can see four, five, six moves down the road.
You begin to think like an air traffic controller.
Driver Six: Performance.
It all comes down to this.
It did at the Academy, and it does so much more here, because you're in a real operation, in a real building, talking to real pilots.
Your confidence is going to go up.
Then it's going to take a hit.
Then up, then another hit.
At the beginning those are big waves.
Here's how you flatten them out: consistency.
Put off leave.
Put off big family events as much as you reasonably can — it doesn't have to be a hundred percent, but as much as you can — so you can train day in and day out, as many days a week as they'll let you.
Three, four, five, whatever it is.
Be there.
Do that, and those waves start to level off. And when they do, two things happen.
You start to trust yourself and your own decision-making.
And your trainer starts to trust you too.
They sits back.
They let you take more of it.
Remember: in training it's still their position, on their ticket.
They're responsible for the operation.
You're responsible for learning and for showing them you've learned.
The more consistent you get, the more you make the right decisions at the right time, the more he — or she — lets go.
And that's when you really start to grow.
I failed a D-side evaluation once at Fort Worth Center.
Then the computer went belly up and we had to run the problem again — and they only had one problem, so it was the exact same scenario.
Now, I may not be the smartest man in the world, but I'm smart enough to know not to do the same thing twice when I already knew where I'd messed up. So I did it the right way. Everybody laughed, because it was pretty obvious.
You don't have to do the drivers.
Nothing says you have to.
Nothing says you have to listen to me at all.
I've just been doing this since 1989 — that's when I started training at my first facility, after the Academy in 1988. Yes, back in the 1900s.
I'm an old man.
It'll be thirty-eight years in November since I hired on with the FAA.
You don't have to take my advice.
I can pretty much guarantee you'll have an easier time if you do.
What Separates Successful Developmentals
You're not a student anymore.
You're a developmental. "Academy graduate" is just the pay band.
Your Academy scores?
Throw them out.
Nobody cares.
Nobody has ever asked me mine.
The only time it ever came up was when I was back at the Academy as an instructor and we sat around going, "hey, what'd you make?" — and I won't even tell you what most of the instructors scored when they went through.
What they care about is what you do at their facility.
It isn't intelligence.
What they're watching for is:
- Are you coachable?
- Are you consistent?
- Are you willing to learn?
- Can you come back from a setback?
Because you are going to make mistakes.
That's not in question.
I've seen trainees who weren't coachable. I've seen trainees who weren't really willing to learn. They're hard to work with and hard to train, because they find it difficult to accept your observations and the way you want to train them.
And I've seen the complete opposite — trainees who came in every single day wanting to learn as much as possible. Those trainees were a joy to train. An absolute joy.
When you make a mistake, acknowledge it and learn from it.
Learn from your mistakes and those mistakes are moving you forward.
Don't learn from them and those same mistakes will stop you in your tracks.
Bad Days, Plateaus, and Self-Doubt
You're going to have bad training days.
Everybody does.
CPCs have bad sessions.
Your trainer is going to have a bad day training you.
We're all people. It happens.
You're also going to plateau.
You'll improve and improve and improve — and then you'll sit at one level and stay there.
The good news is you're not regressing. The bad news is it doesn't feel like you're going anywhere, and your trainer and your supervisor feel it too. They just want a little more so they can certify you on that position, and you're stuck.
That's frustrating.
And if it lasts a while, you start to doubt yourself. You start wondering if you'll ever get to where you need to be.
These are the emotions.
This is exactly why you need a purpose and a plan.
Because there's only one way to crack through a plateau.
One way through the bad training days, the frustration, the self-doubt that shows up in every single trainee.
Be consistent.
Be there, day in and day out.
If you do that, you will get through it.
You will certify.
And remember one more thing about your trainer, and about every controller in that control room, in that tower, in that TRACON: every single one of them was a trainee once.
Every one.
And the ones who volunteer to train — they're volunteers — they want you to succeed. They want you to get to CPC.
They don't just want you to certify, either; they want you to become a great controller. And they'll help you get there.
So focus on daily improvement.
Trust the process.
Keep developing.
You'll get through Level Three.
I'll leave you with this quote from Robert Collier:
"Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out."
That is what it is all about!
If you've got a question, or you need help, head over to sidebysideatc.com and set up a call. It's free, there's no pressure, and we'll just talk for as long as we need to. It says thirty minutes on the calendar — I'm not much for clocks.
Text me if that's easier: 817-233-8199. (I love that I've got two niners in my phone number. Perfect.) Questions, concerns, or something you just want feedback on — I'm happy to help. That's why I'm here. My mission is to help as many people become great controllers as I can.
And whether it's me or somebody else, just remember: don't try to navigate your ATC journey on your own.
Let's do it side by side.
FOR HELP:
To set up a FREE call: sidebysideatc.com/scheduler/free-consult
Pre-Academy
If you are heading to the Academy in the next few months, I put together a structured 90-day preparation blueprint that walks you through exactly what to focus on each month before you go. It's designed to help reduce shock and build confidence before day one. You can download it at: sidebysideatc.com/page/blueprint .
I also have a video where I explain the different things that are on the enroute Non-Radar Map. You can get that video at: sidebysideatc.com/page/map-video .
Already at the Academy
If you are already in the enroute radar portion of the Academy and feeling a little behind or lost, I have a 72-Hour Radar Recovery Plan that will help you get past those feelings and start building confidence. You can download that at : sidebysideatc.com/page/72-hourplan .
If you are interested in my Coaching Programs, you can get information at :
or
sidebysideatc.com/page/radar-recovery if you are needing help with the beginning of enroute radar.
Mentorship Program
For information about my mentorship program : https://sidebysideatc.com/page/mentorship
Questions
You can email me questions, or comments, at: tomhanes@sidebysideatc.com .
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