WATCH OUT NOW

I GOT CERTIFIED TODAY!!!!!!!
HAH-LAY-LOU-JER!!!!

What I had to deal with on my checkride:

• flight of five F18s doing practice flybys at Indy Motor Speedway.  Super annoying.  Had to stop departures like 3 times while they were doing it because CONVENIENTLY they built the airport such that the departure path for the 05s are less that 1 mile east of IMS. 
• flight of five F18s became flight of four because one decided he would rather land than keep flying. 
• gave a SkyWest pilot the thrill of his life by having the flight of four break over the top of him while he was holding in position.  He actually thanked me and said it was worth it to have held short of the runway for 10 minutes to get to have F18s do a carrier break overhead. 
• helicopters.  bleh. only 2 though and they were easy. 
• mostly just the F18s. 

I got done my skill check and was talking to one of my coworkers and she informed me that the F18 pilots had told her that we were welcome to go over to the FBO and check out the planes after work.  So I am going to do that tomorrow, cause I didn't have a camera today.   Expect pictures. 

Awesome.

mmmrrrph.

yesterday at work was pretty retar-culous. I don't think I've ever had my brain reduced to mush as fast as it was yesterday, even after 4 years of calculus, physics, chemistry and meteorology classes.  Within 5 minutes of plugging in, I was wishing I'd called in sick.  ugh.  It is a rare occurrence for me to have my ass kicked on ground control, but it did not take long for me to start swirling down the shitter.

please forgive my atrocious photoshop skills here for a moment:

on this radar image (which remained pretty much the same all afternoon) I have oh-so-kindly drawn the approximate location of our departure gates.  As you can see, pretty much every single one was cut off by death-storms.  The TRACON was not accepting anyone heading east (RID/DAY), south (DAWNN3 departure, OOM, PXV...), nor would they accept people heading north then east, unless they remained below 10,000', which of course no one wanted to do.  So I quickly ran out of places to park planes and pilots were getting snippy with me.  Hellllloooooo, meteorology degree + air traffic control does not equal weather controller, sorry!!!  I was trying my best to work things out to get them outta there, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do.  Also, it was way worse than normal, because this weekend is the INDY 500.  So traffic is way up.

Moving on, I get a mini-break to rest my brain before a skill check on Local control. It was not enough.  I needed like a day to recover from the shit-show on ground control. I was checked, and no skill was found.  What else is new?  I have been training for almost 8 months now.  My "I could've had a baby by now" joke is getting old.  It is torturous.  My supervisor says I am ready, so why not check me out?!  Getting one hour of training a week is not helping me AT ALL.  I cannot get any better at something only being exposed to it an hour a week.  I can handle the traffic (which is so unbelievably, unfunnily SLOW every day I am at work) so why not cut me loose?  Because there are THREE of us in the same position, and they're treating us as ONE person. One of us screws up something, we all get another week/month/year added to our training.  It's stupid.

Here are some more pics from later in the evening when we actually got some t-storm action at the airport. Sorry for the poor quality, blackberry has the worst cameraphone in the history of the world.

Here we had windshear over the whole airport.  My coworker says he has only seen this happen maybe once before. 

here's a black death-cloud over the fedex ramp. 

this looked a lot squirrelier in real life.

well

I can't stay away from photography long.  Not my best work, but not bad for a weak-ass storm.

losing it

photography has always been my main hobby.  I own a bunch of cameras (close to 10 I think...) and I almost always have at least one camera on me at all times.

lately I just haven't been feeling it.  it seems like I can't take a decent picture to save my life.  They all come out horribly over/underexposed, blurry, bad white balance, off center, cut off... I am so frustrated.  Going out and shooting a roll of film or some digital pics used to be so relaxing, now I just get so frustrated and upset that it's not even worth my time.  I even tried not taking pictures for a few weeks.  It didn't help.

Frustrated.  I wonder if the unreasonable strife in my life has something to do with it.

things that make me go LOL

these came off the strip printer a few mornings ago.  Cincy must've been distraught at the loss of their coffee pot :(  I cannot sympathize, though, we have to go down 300' to get to the nearest coffee pot!

and today training on Local...

me: SWA174, Indy tower, you ready to go?

SWA174: We're southwest! We're always ready to go!

me: (giggle) (takeoff clearance)

as they're puttering out onto the runway

SWA174: ehh, that's not what his wife says, he's never ready!!!

also this

is disgusting.

even more things!!!

Last Friday it was getting near the end of my shift.  I'd wandered up to the tower cause I was bored and I wanted to check if anyone wanted a break before I went home.  No one did, but I continued to sit up in the tower and shoot the shit with my coworkers.  A few minutes later, an aural alert went off, accompanied by a red EM on the radar scope. We were all like WTF?  so my coworker zoomed out on his scope and we saw a target way out of our airspace up near FWA at FL390 squawking 7700 (emergency!).  I wasn't working so I went to another scope and watched it (in horror).  With each scan, it dropped 4000' to 5000'.  In under 3 minutes it had dropped from FL390 to 10,000'.  I thought for sure it was going to KEEP descending, and I was feeling a little nauseous at the prospect. When it leveled off at 10,000 I breathed a sigh of relief and guessed there was some sort of pressurization problem.  I recalled something from the academy about unpressurized flight only occurring at or below 10,000'.  I'm so smart!!

Anyway, a few minutes later the phone rang, the plane was coming here to land (it was a pressurization problem after all).  So they made me work ground.  It'd been a hot minute since I'd worked an emergency on ground control, probably as far back as when I was still training (October-ish!).  So I muddled my way through that, and the plane landed without incident.  and I breathed several more sighs of relief.

Almost a week later and I'm still vomiting in my mouth a little thinking about that ridiculous descent rate.  Had I been on that plane I'd probably have been barfing everywhere.  Guess that's why I'm a controller, not a pilot!

(side note: squawking is a dumb word.  it requires way too much concentration to type/spell right.)

hmmm... what else?  Nothing, really.  Still keeping on keeping on in training.  the end may be in sight, but I don't want to jinx myself and end up with 8 MORE months of training :/  my new favorite thing to tell people is that I could've had a baby in the time it's taken me and my 2 RDO-mates to certify.

Also I had a man show up at my door today with a can full of ant-killer.  very exciting!  no more ants!  I even left some food crumbs out while I was at work and NO! NOT ONE ANT!  Hooray! :)