Week 1 Sim Session: First transmission: getting on frequency

Ninety minutes in which everybody transmits, everybody is unintelligible at least once, and nobody is marked

24 February 2027

You will transmit today. Not next week.

The single most common failure in week 1 is not getting on frequency at all — sitting with a finger near the switch, composing a perfect call, while the frequency moves on without you. The drill is built to make that impossible.

Before you arrive#

Nothing to install and nothing to read. Bring a headset if you own one; there are enough for everybody if you don’t.

If you want to arrive with something, listen to a live ATC stream for ten minutes and write down one thing you could not parse. Bring that. It is more useful than the whole reading list, because it is your own ear failing on something specific.

In the session#

First twenty minutes — the shape of a call. Callsign, instruction, constraint. We do it on a whiteboard, badly, until everybody can produce the skeleton without thinking about the words that go in it.

Next forty — the round-robin. Every student takes the pilot seat once, Halvard or I take the controller position, and you get one clearance to read back. Nobody is graded. The point is the physical business of it: keying the switch, hearing your own voice arrive with no sidetone, discovering that you started talking before you knew how the sentence ended. That last one happens to everybody once.

Last thirty — being stepped on. We do this deliberately. Two students are asked to transmit at the same moment, and the rest of the room reports what they heard. Sometimes it is a whine. Sometimes it is one voice, perfectly clear, and the other person has no idea they were not heard.

That is the fact the whole course hangs off. Week 5 is an accident in which exactly this happened, and 583 people died, and it is much easier to take seriously in week 5 if you have felt it in week 1.

Afterwards#

Nothing is submitted. What leaves the session is the third spec line: you can describe being stepped on from the transmitting side. If you can’t, you were not the one transmitting, and you should say so — we will run it again next week rather than let you get to week 5 without it.