Henning said:
I'm confused, are y'all actually ATC controllers, or a group whose hooby it is to simulate ATC?
We are a group of *simulated* ATCS and do this for fun on the internet. We all have to train though, and learn SOP's for our facility(ies). Fore more information visit the
VATSIM website and/or
Virtual Boston ARTCC (vZBW)
for more information. Note: It is all simulated, so don't take it as the real ZBW
.
If it's a hobby and you're good at it, there's always ads for ATC personelle world wide. I know they're recruiting them here in Australia. If y'all are really ATC,.......hhhmmmmmm.......y'all must really love your jobs, good on you.
Again, we're simulated, but we enjoy it.
Now regardless of all that, how tight is the simulation, and are you all playing off the same sheet of music as an orchestra so be it? How large, complex and busy is the traffic? Who/what is conducting said orchestra? Is it set up realistically to the system? Looked a bit interesting. The times I visited ATC, I was amazed at how antiquated and archaic the equipment was.
The simulation is 95% realistic. We operate via the internet and we are on the radar side, while virtual pilots connect through a program the install into their Flight Simulator Program (programs are available for X-plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002/2004. We have a simulated radar client that depicts targets as they would normally appear (we do have an option to select which radar type we want, right now it's mainly ARTS [Approach Radar] and DSR [Center radar]. The skill levels of the pilots are mainly poor because they don't know what they're doing half the time, but the rest of em' are real sharp and are real certificated pilots just practicing approaches, etc.
I'm a member at vZBW (excuse me if I substitude ZBW for vZBW) and I work at Boston. I switch around occasionally, so if we have staffing at Boston already (DEL up to APP and CTR) I'll move to a class C Approach such as PVD or BDL. Traffic is dependant on the time of day and the day itself and fluctuates often. Some nights I could be vectoring 20 aircraft for the ILS to 22L or I can be giving 1 touch-n-go clearance to a 172 in the pattern at Boston Logan (heh, yea, that ones a joke, but does really happen
)
Radars were old and high maint, peices of paper were going around the room, your "hand off" as it were, and the slips would come in off a printer from the facility that was handing you off, say Kansas City Center to Memphis Center. Information management was key. I was also very impressed with the way the people worked with it. Makes you think about all the other man hours of work others do to keep you flying, especially IFR. Even when you're VFR, you can be an annoyance to them
. Ronald Reagans dream would have been to have ATC clubs.
We use automatic handoffs which basically all the facilities are doing now. We type in a nice key command (which real facilities do) and the datablock of the aircraft to be handed off starts flashing on their screen. I personally use flight progress strips, but we have not formally created a system to make it automated and have strips pop out, etc., so I have to hand-write them for now. Note: I only use them during low/moderate traffic. Our radar client has it's own set of virtual strips in it, so I revert to those when I'm too busy to right it down.
Let me know if you have more questions. The
VATSIM website explains it well, so I recommend you head over there for a while and read up.