Still unpacking, 2 days under my belt

Back on Friday, I landed at TPA and stayed at Ma & Robs. Saturday, we departed cold Tampa - drove through a cold front - and baked in Warm and very humid PBI. While moving Sat, we sweated our you know whats off! It was 80+ with a dewpoint of 70! After spending 2 months in OKC with a light chill, it was reall nice to have shorts on, sandles, t-shirt w/out a jacket, and sunglasses.

Ma & Rob left Sunday around noon. Tuesday was my first day at PBI. Really nice laid backed people there. They really create a nice atmosphere to work in….at least it appears so. ha. I’m in classroom training for about 2 weeks before they send me upstairs to continue familarization training. The positions to learn in order are Flight Data.Clearance Delivery (FD/CD), Ground Control (GC), and Local Control (LC).

In about 2 weeks, I’ll plug in on FD/CD, listen in at times (familiarization) and other times actually talk to pilots. I have something like 25 hours max on FD/CD that I can talk to pilots before I need to check out in that position. In a day, I may talk to pilots for an hour or two. After checking out on FD/CD position, I move onto GC and train and check out within X amount of hours. And so on, and so on.

Days off: During classroom training, I have off weekends. Once upstairs, I have off Tues and Wed till June sometime. Then in July, my days off are Sat and Sun. I earn 4 hours of sick and annual leave every 2 week pay period. I also learned that I can earn upto 24 credit hours per pay period also. So if I stay one extra hour on my shift and I am doing something meaningful such as controlling traffic,  I’ll earn 1 credit hour. Of course, this has to be approved by a manager. Credit hours can be used for sick, vacation, etc. Do the math, and after one year, I could potentially have earned alot of time off.

So far, the job is going well. Learning the rules for this airport, airspace, etc is the toughest part. But, people are getting checked out in tower in about 8-10 months if not sooner. Remember, each position I check out in, I recieve about a $6,000 pay raise. Yay.

 Back to reviewing.

This entry was posted on January 23, 2008 at 9:58 pm and is filed under All Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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