Halvard Sunde

Co-lecturer. Twenty-two years on one en-route sector, and the other voice on the frequency for most of this course's sim sessions.

A staff portrait, toned in the site's gold and bronze. An older man with grey hair and a grey beard, in a dark sweater over an open collar, facing the camera square on with an even, unhurried expression against a plain warm wall.
Role
Co-lecturer
Affiliation
Slop University School of Language and Safety
Email
halvard.sunde@slop.university
Contact
Ask on frequency during a sim session — that is the fastest route, and the answer usually belongs to the whole room. Email works for anything that needs a document attached to it.

Twenty-two years as an area controller, almost all of it on the same en-route sector. Retired from the operational roster, not from the frequency: still holds a rating, and works the controller position in most of this course’s sim sessions.

Brings the half of the loop that the pilot-facing literature tends to leave out. Readback is the part everyone teaches. Hearback — the controller’s duty to notice that the readback was wrong, under the traffic load that made the error likely in the first place — is the part that fails, and it is difficult to teach from a transcript because the transcript has no workload in it.

What to ask about

What a frequency actually sounds like when it is busy. Why controllers depart from standard phraseology, and which departures are worth arguing about. What it is like to hear a wrong readback and have to decide, in about a second, whether it matters.

A standing disagreement

Week 7 argues that non-standard phraseology is a defect. That position is not unanimous among the people teaching this course, and the lecture will say so rather than smoothing it over. Twenty-two years of doing the job is a data source, and so is the accident record; where they disagree, the disagreement is the interesting part.