Sim Sessions
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each sim session, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
A sim session is the hour you spend on a simulated frequency rather than reading about one. Twelve of them, one a week, and you transmit in the first.
Each page says what to bring, what happens in the order it happens, and what leaves the room. The spec on each one is a contract: if you cannot do those things afterwards, the session did not work, and saying so is more useful to us than attendance.
Several sessions measure something about you — your confusion pairs in week 2, your hearback miss count in week 3, your comprehension scores in week 9. None of those numbers is marked or appears in any assessment. They are deliberately free, because a measurement you are graded on is a measurement you will manage rather than take.
- Week1
First transmission: getting on frequency
Ninety minutes in which everybody transmits, everybody is unintelligible at least once, and nobody is marked
- Week2
Alphabet and numbers, under noise
Drills at the edge of intelligibility, because the alphabet you know in a quiet room is not the one you will need
- Week3
Running the loop with errors in it
You take the controller position, errors are planted in the readbacks, and we count how many you catch
- Week4
Clearance drills, including the illegal forms
Takeoff and landing clearances at speed, plus deliberate practice at producing the wrong forms so you can hear them
- Week5
From report to rule
Read the primary sources and map each finding onto a phrase that now exists — or onto nothing, which is the interesting column
- Week6
Levels, pressure, and advisory versus instruction
Number drills, a pressure-setting exercise, and a block where you have to say which sentence type you just heard
- Week7
Transcript triage
Mark up real transcripts, separate deviation from delivery, and argue the harm of each one you claim
- Week8
Rating the samples
You apply the ICAO descriptors to recorded speakers, discover you disagree with each other, and then find out what the examiner gave them
- Week9
Degraded audio, and what the room heard
Comprehension at the edge, then the same clip again once you have been told what it says — which you cannot un-hear
- Week10
A datalink-only sector
Fly a sector with no voice at all, and write down the moment you notice something you have stopped knowing
- Week11
Audit workshop
Bring the draft, get it attacked by somebody who wants it to be wrong, and find out which of your phrases has no failure behind it
- Week12
Audit presentations and the live frequency check
Five minutes each on what you found, then the checks run in booked slots through the rest of the week