ATM Welcome
July 1, 2010In 2003 I had the opportunity to spend a year as the training administrator at another VATSIM ARTCC that was in a rebuilding stage. The team of people I worked with in training were extremely dedicated, knowledgeable, and dynamic - however we soon realized that we would never be able to scale the training program and retain the same level of quality without increasing our efficiency.
We identified "written training materials" as an area that presented the greatest potential for effort vs. reward. The entire team bought into this concept and started researching, writing, and reviewing the materials. A few weeks later we published our syllabus that presented the basic concepts required for a student controller to progress from a complete newbie to the approach level in a well organized, concise, and easy to read (somewhat humorous at times) manner. Years later, I still encounter people who learned their first few nuggets about virtual air traffic control from those written materials. Thus the vision of creating such a resource at ZLA had been brewing in the back of many of our minds for years - but was never targeted as a priority.
Since April 2009, one of ZLA's goals has been to increase efficiency wherever possible. While the ZLA training staff already provides more than 1000 hours of live (on the network) training per year - we are constantly looking for new ways to keep "the machine" running as efficiently as possible. Publishing a set of standard training materials would provide a method for consistent teaching, give students 24/7 access to the information, and enable ZLA to benefit from years of training staff experience without complete exposure to attrition.
With the vision of the training materials project well defined, ZLA turned to Peter "PG" Grey to oversee the entire project - organization, selecting an IT platform, content generation, integration to the existing training program, to final implementation. PG managed to keep people engaged and kept his cool over a 17 month period when (as can be expected) people would sometimes go long periods of time without completing a deliverable or providing feedback on the details. Without Peter's dedication to ZLA and commitment to excellence - this guide you are about to experience might never have existed.
There are many other people who made contributions of time and expertise to this project. Aside from Peter there are three people specifically who stand out due to the content they were responsible for reviewing, generating, and revising:
Eric "ES" Stearns
Alex Stjepanovic
Eugene "ZS" Zaporozhets
Other contributors to vision, testing, IT, and on-going content maintenance:
Michael Cassel
Richard "RC" Gerrish
Tyler "TG" Goeggel
Gerry "GH" Hattendorf
Kevin "KC" Meyers
Brad "BP" Podd
Zach "ZP" Pratt
Will Stewart
Wade "WW" Williams
On behalf of everyone at ZLA - past, present, and future, I'd like to say thank you to each and every one of the contributors above for providing us with such a valuable resource.
Sincerely,
Bradley "BP" Podd
ZLA ATM
"Strategy gets you on the playing field, but execution pays the bills."
- Gordon Eubanks
