Week 3 Sim Session: 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

10 March 2027

Priya is rostered away this week, so Halvard runs it — which is the right way round, because today everybody sits on the controller side.

Before you arrive#

Re-read the Linate communications sequence in the week 3 lecture. You do not need the full ANSV report, but do come having decided what you would have had to hear in that readback for it to have stopped you.

In the session#

Warm-up, ten minutes. Standard exchanges, no errors, until the room is fluent. We start from a working frequency rather than a cold one, because a catch rate measured while you are still finding the switch is a measurement of the wrong thing.

The main drill, sixty minutes. You take the controller position. Six to nine aircraft, flown by the rest of the room and by Halvard, load increasing through the block. A scripted proportion of readbacks contain a single planted error — a digit, a runway designator, a callsign, a missing constraint.

You are not told the proportion, and it is the same for everybody.

Every catch and every miss is logged against your name. At the end you get one number: how many planted errors you confirmed as correct.

Nobody has ever caught all of them. The expected result is that you will confirm several errors while feeling entirely on top of the frequency, and that is the finding, not a failure.

Debrief, twenty minutes. We play back one error you personally confirmed and you say what you heard. The answer is almost always that you heard the correct clearance — not that you heard nothing.

The thing we are careful about#

Your catch rate is not marked, and it does not appear in any assessment. It exists so that week 3’s claim is something you have evidence for about yourself rather than something you were told about controllers in general.

Marking it would wreck it: you would work the frequency to protect a number instead of at the pace that produces the error.

Afterwards#

Write your catch rate on your confusion list from week 2. Both numbers come back in week 11, when you have to write findings about somebody else’s transcript and the honest question is what you would have missed in their seat.