Most students who struggle at the Academy — and eventually wash out — aren't failing because they're lazy. They're not failing because they don't care. Almost every student who walks through those doors in Oklahoma City is working hard. They're studying, they're trying, they want it. 

The problem isn't effort. 

The problem is that they don't have a plan. And without a plan, all that effort has nowhere to go.

This is Driver #2 in the Six Drivers of ATC Success series, and in a lot of ways it's the one that determines whether Driver #1 — your purpose — ever gets a chance to matter. Because if you fall behind at the Academy without a framework to pull yourself back on track, even the strongest why in the world starts to feel like it isn't enough.

When you first arrive at the Academy, you go through basics along with everyone else. And basics is, honestly, a lot like a college course — except compressed into four weeks. Five days a week, eight hours a day, for 20 days. About 160 hours of instruction. It's a lot of material delivered fast, but you can still study the way you're used to studying. You learn it, you take the test, you move on.

That experience gives you the wrong idea about what the Academy is actually going to be like.

The day after you pass basics and walk into your first en route, tower, or TRACON class, everything changes. 

The first few days might not feel dramatically different because they're still mostly delivering information. But they're delivering that information while telling you what you're going to need to know to work simulated traffic. And I hesitate to even say simulated, because by the time you get to your evals — non-radar, radar, or tower — it might as well be real. 

I guarantee you it feels real.

The pace picks up fast. The information keeps coming. And students who haven't built a structure for how they're going to manage all of it find themselves reacting instead of executing. 

Here's what I've seen from the classes that do extraordinarily well. 

Recently, a class in en route passed 13 out of 13. That almost never happens. When people on Discord asked how they did it, the answers kept coming back to the same thing: 

they worked together, and they had a plan from the very beginning.

Not just a loose idea of studying with classmates. 

An actual schedule — written out before they even started the non-radar portion of en route. 

Who was practicing with whom, where, and when, mapped out for the entire stretch of training. 

That level of preparation doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen if you wait until you're already in the thick of it.

Ideally, you start building this before you get to Oklahoma City. 

Connect with your classmates early. At the absolute latest, get the framework in place during basics — before the real training begins. I know that's hard when you don't yet know exactly what's coming, but you don't need to know the specifics to set up the structure. 

Build the framework first. 

You'll fill in the details once the training starts and you know what you actually need to work on.

The goal is to make sure that when things get hard — and they will — you're not scrambling to figure out who you're practicing with tonight. That's already decided. You just have to show up and do the work.

If you're going en route, there is one thing you can and should get ahead of before you arrive: the map. 

Learn it before you get there. Encourage your classmates to do the same.

Here's why this matters more than it might seem. At the Academy, they give you dedicated time during certain parts of the day to work on map study. If you already know the map — or have made serious progress on it — that time suddenly becomes available for something else. You can use it to ask your instructors questions about the things they've been teaching you. You can solidify your understanding of concepts that haven't fully clicked yet. 

Whether you're en route, tower, or TRACON, you have to know your map and your airspace so well that you don't have to think about it. That knowledge needs to be automatic. The sooner you start building it, the more runway you give yourself when the real work begins.

One of the clearest patterns I saw as an instructor is the difference between students who are proactive and students who are reactive. 

In the classroom portion, being reactive is manageable — uncomfortable, but manageable. 

In the lab, it falls apart fast.

You cannot run lab problems well if you're just reacting to what's in front of you. You have to go on the offensive. You have to be ahead of the traffic, ahead of the scenario, ahead of the problem. And the way you get there is through a plan that keeps you practicing the right things, consistently, before you ever sit down at the scope.

When you get into the labs, every scenario has something in it that you need to take away. Something you're going to see again. Something important. After each problem, when the instructor goes over it with you — ask questions. Push for answers. 

I'll be honest: not every instructor is going to take the time to really dig into what went wrong and why. Some of them will want to move on quickly. That's on you to push back on. Insist on understanding what happened. 

Here's where a lot of students fall apart, and it's something a plan directly helps with.

You have a bad run. Something goes sideways in the scenario, you make mistakes, and you walk out of the lab with your confidence shaken. You get home and you're grasping — not sure what to work on, not sure what went wrong, not sure where to start. 

The focused, intentional practice that you need most right now becomes scattered and inconsistent. You come back the next day still struggling. The frustration builds. And suddenly it's a cycle that's very hard to break.

Compare that to this: you have a bad run, you identify the one or two specific things that went wrong, and you bring those things to your practice group that evening. You tell your classmates exactly what you need to work on. You run scenarios that target those specific mistakes. You come back the next day, and while you might make new mistakes, you don't make the same ones. 

You're improving. 

Day after day, you're improving. 

And that improvement — even when it's small — is what brings the confidence back.

As a trainer working with live traffic, I never got frustrated when trainees made mistakes. Mistakes are why you're training. What got me was when a trainee made the same mistake over and over. That tells me they're not improving. 

At the Academy, improvement is the whole game. They're not expecting you to be perfect — they're expecting you to get better. In en route, they give you 28 days before your first eval. That's five and a half weeks. Use every day of it.

When you're trying to process what went wrong and figure out what to work on, I want you to resist the urge to try and fix everything at once. 

Ask yourself three questions at the end of every day:

What was the biggest issue I had? 

What do I think caused it? 

What's the one thing I can focus on to make sure it doesn't happen again?

One thing at a time. 

Work on it until it's not a problem anymore, then move to the next thing. 

Students who try to address eight issues simultaneously usually solve none of them. 

Students who chip away at one thing at a time make steady, visible progress — and that progress compounds.

Planning isn't just for your study schedule. 

It applies inside the lab too — right down to how you approach each individual problem.

In en route non-radar, you get 15 minutes to pre-plan before a problem starts. In the first week, that's enough time to work through the entire scenario. Use every second of it. Go through your checklist completely, without skipping anything. 

For anyone who's a pilot reading this — you know you don't skip steps in a preflight checklist. 

You follow it in precise, deliberate order, because skipping something is how things go wrong. Same principle applies here.

After the first week, the problems will be too complex to fully pre-plan in 15 minutes. But the checklist still has to happen. You still have to go through every step. The problems are going to get faster and more complicated as training progresses — that's intentional. 

The early scenarios are where you get the basics locked in. But you have to have planned to use them that way, or you'll drift through them instead of building on them.

The more consistently you follow your plan inside the lab, the more automatic it becomes. And that's exactly what you want — because automatic means bandwidth freed up for the things that are harder to systematize.

I don't expect your practice schedule to be perfect. 

Life happens. 

People get tired, get sick, need a night off. 

That's fine and it's normal. 

If you and your classmates can stick to the schedule 90 to 95 percent of the time, you're doing well. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A plan followed imperfectly still beats no plan at all — by a wide margin.

And one more thing on the topic of working together: avoid cliques. 

I've seen classes where the stronger students cluster together and the students who are struggling get left on the outside. That's a mistake for everyone involved. 

Rotate who you're practicing with. 

Work with every person in your class. 

The students who seem to be behind have something to offer that no one else does — a different perspective, a different set of questions, a different way of seeing the problem. You're missing out if you leave them out.

Have a plan. 

Build it early. 

Follow it consistently. 

Take what the day gave you and work on it that night. 

The habits you build at the Academy don't stay at the Academy. 

They're going to follow you to your first facility, to your first position, to every challenge this career puts in front of you.