Last week we talked about a tool for your tool belt — how to actually learn as an air traffic controller, and what learning even means in this profession. 

This week's tool is one you might not expect.

Listening.

I know what some of you are thinking. Tom, I think you flipped your lid. 

Hear me out. 

Listening is one of the most important — and most underrated — tools in your entire ATC tool belt.

I want to open with a quote from Stephen Covey, from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

Most people read that as a lesson about relationships. 

I think it's also one of the best lessons — especially early in your ATC career — for becoming an air traffic controller. Because before you can communicate effectively, you have to become an exceptional listener. 

At the Academy especially, this matters enormously, and it doesn't matter which option you're in.

This tool builds on last week's. 

They all will — each tool we cover adds to the one before it.

Here's what I want you to understand right out of the gate: listening is not a passive exercise. 

It's not something you sit back and let happen. 

That's how most people "listen" — and it's exactly why most people are bad at it.

Listening is something you decide to do. 

Something you actively do. 

And especially early in your career, when everything is new and you're learning all of it at once, that's when listening matters most.

And I don't just mean listening in the classroom to your instructors — though that matters too. 

I mean actually listening to the frequency. 

Listening to what the person on the other end is telling you, so that you can then tell them what they need to hear back.

As air traffic controllers, we should be spending far more of our time listening than we spend transmitting instructions.

Listening is how we understand what this part of the picture is going to be — how we understand this one pixel of the overall picture we're building. 

It's how we detect problems. 

At the Academy, it can be as simple as the pseudo-pilot saying something wrong. If you don't catch it, the error is on you. Just like in the real world — the pilot can say something wrong, and if you as the controller don't catch it, the fault is yours.

You have to verify instructions. 

You give an instruction, the pilot reads it back — that read back is your opportunity to listen and make sure they actually heard what you said. I can't tell you how many times I've told a pilot "turn left" and gotten "right" read back. Or said "right" and gotten "left." 

It happens. It will happen to you.

Listening also lets you anticipate conflicts. 

Say you just climbed someone to fifteen thousand, and right after that, someone else checks on at fifteen thousand. It's rarely that simple in real life, but that's a clue — if you're listening. Oh, I've got two guys at fifteen thousand. Are they anywhere near each other? If they are, you might just have a chance to solve the conflict before it becomes an error.

And listening keeps you ahead of the operation. 

One thing that will slow you down faster than almost anything — and I use "slow" and "faster" on purpose — is not hearing when aircraft check on. Because if you don't respond, guess what happens? They check on again. And if you're already busy, that's the last thing you need.

As you get better as a controller, you'll start anticipating who's going to call you next. That can happen even at the Academy. But even when you've anticipated the call, you still have to listen to what the pilot actually says. 

Don't assume you already know. Listen.

I'll tell you from experience, both as an instructor in Oklahoma City and in the real world: a controller who doesn't listen well is almost always behind the traffic they're working. Doesn't matter if it's a tower, a TRACON, or a center. 

If you're not listening, you're not dialed in. 

If you're not dialed in, you're behind. 

It's that simple.

Level One — pre-Academy. 

Start deciding right now how you can listen better. A lot of students tell me they listen to live ATC to get a feel for the job, and that's fine — just understand the phraseology you hear from CPCs on live ATC isn't necessarily what you'll need to pass the Academy or your CTI program. 

These are working controllers, and working controllers don't always use 100% by-the-book phraseology. I know we're supposed to. We don't always. Sometimes plain English gets the point across faster.

But it still helps. 

And something else that helps just as much: become a better listener with the people around you, in whatever job you're working right now. 

Build that muscle in regular life before you ever get to the Academy. 

It will pay off immensely, both there and after.

Level Two — the Academy. 

Keep listening to live ATC, but change how you do it. 

Listen while you're doing something else — reading an SOP, working through a letter of agreement — and let the listening happen in the background. Not entirely in the background, though. 

You want to develop the ability to focus on one thing while part of your brain is still monitoring the frequency.

I'm a firm believer that true multitasking doesn't exist — not for us, not even for the fastest supercomputers. They just do one thing so quickly it looks like several things at once. 

Same with controllers. 

It looks like multitasking. 

It isn't, not really. 

It's just speed.

Here's where this shows up at the in-route Academy: you sit down at the sector, get your briefing, and start opening up your boxes and setting up your EDST display. While you're doing that, the R-side is talking to airplanes, gives one of them a crossing restriction — and the pilot reads it back wrong. It's scripted that way on purpose.

Two things can happen. 

If you're listening while you handle the relatively unimportant task of setting up your monitor, you catch it and tell the R-side, "Hey, that guy read back ten thousand instead of eleven thousand." Job done — go back to what you were doing.

Or, you were heads-down on your EDST setup and missed it entirely. The R-side will say something like "verify assigned altitude" or "say again." If you ever hear your R-side say anything like that, stop what you're doing immediately — there was a readback error, and it's your job to make sure the R-side knows it got missed.

If that error isn't caught and the aircraft descends to the wrong altitude, now you have to coordinate with approach control for a non-LOA altitude. Miss that, and it's a coordination error. If there's traffic, it could turn into a separation error — worth many, many more points than a late monitor setup.

Focus on what matters. 

This shows up at TRACON and tower too — missed readbacks, bad readbacks, some scripted, some not. 

Catching them is your job, and listening is the only way to do it. 

The task isn't complete until the pilot reads it back correctly. 

Only then do you move to the next one.

Level Three — your first facility. 

Exactly the same principle, just with real consequences. 

Your task isn't complete until it's read back — or, if you're coordinating with another controller, until they give their initials and you give yours. After that, it's on them if they heard it wrong. That's why, at the Academy, coordination readbacks get scripted wrong so often. The FAA wants you listening because you need to be listening. That's why this is such an early tool in the series.

At your first facility you're also learning to listen to live traffic for the first time — every pilot with a different voice, a different accent, some radios harder to pick up than others. 

Listening becomes huge.

Level Four — CPC, training others. 

Listening never goes away. Its importance never diminishes, not even a little. One nice side effect: if you become a genuinely great listener at work, you're going to become a better listener away from work too — and I guarantee that makes your whole life better.

One: Listen for understanding. 

Don't just hear something — understand it. If you don't understand what someone's asking you to do, ask. This comes up a lot at the en route Academy with identifiers and locations — the remote controller gives you a fix you don't recognize, and you can ask them what it is. But you only get that chance if you were listening in the first place.

Two: Listen for accuracy. 

This is what I've been describing. Did the pilot read back the correct altitude, heading, turn, runway? Did they give you the correct call sign? I've had pilots think they were cleared to one runway when I said another, and end up on the wrong one — sometimes that's disastrous. I've also had a control instruction meant for one pilot get read back by an entirely different one. It's your responsibility as the controller to make sure what you communicate gets communicated correctly, and gets understood by the right person. If your mind is already moving to the next task, you'll miss those readbacks. 

And that can be disastrous.

Three: Listen to the entire frequency. 

Don't fixate on one airplane. You can develop an instinct for who's about to call you — but sometimes you'll be expecting one aircraft and someone else calls up entirely. You have to stay open to whoever's actually calling. There are a lot of similar call signs out there, and if you're not listening well, you'll make assumptions about who's talking to you — and they'll be wrong.

Four: Listen ahead. 

As one transmission ends, you're already starting to think about the next one — that's fine, as long as you're not doing it before the transmission actually ends. As you get more proficient, you'll be three, four, five, six steps ahead in your plan, and that's exactly when it gets dangerous, because your instinct is to jump to your next move before the pilot even finishes the readback.

Let me tell you a story. 

I'd been out for two weeks — my daughter had surgery. First day back at Love Field, first fifteen minutes on position. I go upstairs, tell a Southwest aircraft to taxi into position and hold on one runway. A pilot on a different runway reads it back. 

Problem: that second guy had another 737 on short final to his runway.

Fortunately, I was listening. I caught the readback from the wrong pilot and told him, "Negative, that was for someone else, hold short." He stopped. That prevented a disaster.

That's how fast things happen. That's how quickly calm and normal can flip into the exact opposite. You have to listen.

Five: Listen before you speak. 

Don't rush. 

If you're taking notes, they should be in all caps with a lot of exclamation points — but don't rush the listening itself. This is the number one mistake I see students make at the Academy and trainees make at their first facility. Don't rush. 

Think. 

Your most important tools aren't your keyboard or your strips — they're your ears and your brain. 

Think, then transmit.

Sometimes the best transmission you make is the one you don't make at all.

Listening isn't separate from the six drivers we've talked about — it's woven into them. 

It's part of your plan, because working through a plan means actually processing what you hear. 

It builds your picture, because every call from a pilot is the beginning of a pixel in that bigger picture you're constructing of your sector.

Miss the listening, and you miss the details. 

And this profession is all about the details.

So work on developing different ways of listening. 

Start pre-Academy. 

Try a technique, run it through the success cycle — test it, fail at it sometimes, learn from it, get better, try again.

Listen for understanding. 

Listen for accuracy. 

Listen to the whole frequency, not just one airplane. 

Listen ahead, but not too far ahead. 

Listen before you speak.

The better you listen, the faster and better your picture develops. 

The better your picture, the better your decisions. 

And the better your decisions, the safer and more efficient a controller you become. 

That's how important this is.

I'll leave you with this: "When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new."

It's hard to learn while you're talking. 

It's a lot easier while you're listening.

If you need help anywhere in your ATC journey, please get help. I'm as close as a text or a phone call — you can reach me at 817-233-8299, or set up a free consultation at sidebysideatc.com . 

I'll answer any question you've got and talk through wherever you are on your journey, because I just want to help you get where you want to go.

Remember, you don't have to navigate your ATC journey alone. Let's do it side by side.