I felt super proud to be an A area controller on Thursday and Friday as we handled all of the craziness associated with the president’s visit to Seattle. Thanks for all of your professionalism and skill over those two days.
Summer guides
I have been having a number of conversations among the E-board and management about our summer guides.
When Derek, Russ, and I negotiated our 2022 guides last summer (and by “negotiated” I mean that I sat in the room as a brand-new rep while Derek expertly took care of things), we collaboratively agreed that we would leave our guides the same as the previous year, which means that Monday-Friday between Memorial Day and the end of August we would staff one additional controller for the day shift and one additional controller for the swing shift. We then agreed to not initially staff to those guides because traffic levels hadn’t yet returned to pre-pandemic levels and our staffing is so low. We collaboratively agreed that we would revisit the guides when traffic levels got busier.
As you all know, traffic is getting busier.
The agency is projecting that ZSE will be back to 2019 traffic levels by mid-July.
We are obviously still ridiculously short in the area. On one hand, I’m cognizant that if we increase our guides, that means that many of you will be assigned even more unwanted overtime and it will be even harder for all of us to get leave that’s not titled “sick leave”.
I don’t like either of those things. We need to get to a place where we have less unwanted OT and a place where it’s easier for us to get leave.
Having said that, the safety of the operation is obviously paramount, and I want to make sure that we’re protected as traffic levels continue to increase. And we also need to have more staffing so that we have a chance to keep training during the busy time of the year.
I don’t think that we need to increase guides starting at Memorial Day, but I think they need to be higher before we hit the busiest time of the year.
Therefore, I am advocating that we increase our guides M-F (to 11 for day shifts and 10 for swing shifts) beginning on June 19 and continuing through the end of August. The agency seems to be on the same page about this, and I hope to finalize an agreement with Russ about it in the next week.
National Training Initiative
I recently participated in a briefing about the NTI, which was presented by members of the national CWG who created it.
On the floor, I’ve heard various members of management say a whole bunch of confusing and inaccurate things about the NTI.
In an effort to alleviate confusion and provide you all with the information that I have, here are some takeaways from that briefing:
Both the agency and NATCA want to get people certified as quickly as possible, which is the whole point of this. We all agree – and nowhere is it more obvious than in our area with the number of OT shifts we’re being assigned – that the sooner we can get more people certified, the better.
The CWG, composed of both NATCA and management, did a lot of research and determined that they expect trainees to receive 12-15 hours of OJT per week if they have certifications and 15-18 hours if they don’t. This is not a requirement. The word that the agency and NATCA agreed upon is “expectation.”
The agency tracks every day whether trainees receive OJT for that day. I’ve heard management say numerous times on the floor that trainees “need” to get three hours of OJT per day, but that’s not a thing. They do track OJT on a daily basis, but there’s no daily expectation.
The NTI recognizes that situations will arise that prevent students from achieving the expected hours of OJT. The point of tracking it every day is so that they can go back and identify impediments to training in an effort to ensure that trainees get their time in subsequent weeks.
The CWG said that nothing in the NTI is intended to be punitive. I’ve heard the agency talking locally about how so-and-so needs to get blank-number-of-minutes training, or else they’re going to “have” to go back and look at the entire week to figure out why so-and-so didn’t get their time. To that I say, “OK, have at it.” It’s great for them to figure out how we can do better. However, should anyone ever come to you and say something like, “Hey you were on CIC and didn’t get so-and-so their training time. That’s unacceptable,” please let me know.
TAV Cadre
We need two volunteers to assist with administering our area-specific training for the new terrain maps, which are scheduled to go into effect this August.
The two volunteers will work day shifts on June 13-14 off the control floor to help finalize a PowerPoint presentation that the airspace office has been building. Then they’d work day shifts M-F between July 11-22 to administer the training to the area.
If you’re interested let me know as soon as possible.
In solidarity,
Dan Rasmussen
801-860-3821