Hi everyone,

This post is an update on the changes and achievements of ATC Training from the past few months.

Firstly, welcome to @Stephen Lee(NC Lead Mentor) and @Will Hinshaw(TWR Lead Mentor) who have joined the ATC Training team. Stephen and Will have both been active members of the community and huge contributors to ATC Training as mentors in recent months and years and it’s been a breath of fresh air to have some new inputs and new faces around the staff team for the last month or so.

Q1 2023
I’ve attached the Q1 stats here. Some areas I think are worth highlighting:

• 10 TWR exam passes is the most since Q1 2021. The TWR team has done an excellent job to be able to see through the training of many students who had been near to the end of their training for a while.
• Mentor efficiency of 26 sessions per student for CTR. Harry has been putting a lot of emphasis on keeping this number as low as possible. Generally we are focusing a lot on making the most out of mentors time at the moment and CTR is a great example of the benefits of doing so - the resulting 3 passes being the most CTR passes since Q4 2020 (6) and prior to that Q3 2017 (4).

We spend most of our time in ATC Training working on training current students however we also have development projects that we work on on the side. I’ve included below an update of development work from Q1 2023:

• The second revision of the guide to final approach was released;
• We released a new document giving guidance on the use of the vFPC plugin;
• We released the enroute Visiting and transferring Moodle course, finalised the admin system and started the training of the first students under the new system;
• We completed the core lesson plans for structured tower training which sees us one step closer to rolling out the first version of the new ‘basic training’.

TGNC Process Change
Moving back to current changes, the TGNC team have been working hard on some tweaks to the OBS-S1 Training. The TGNC have written their own update which goes into detail on these changes and why we are making them. All members currently training towards or waiting to start OBS-S1 training are strongly encouraged to read this update which can be found here. I’ve also included an overview below.

Changes include:

• Changes to how seminar places are offered;
• Changes to the waiting list and offering of practical training places;
• Time constraints to complete required theory exams;
• Removal of EGNX as a training aerodrome.

Why?

• To reduce the wait between OBS_PT2 mentoring sessions during practical training;
• To improve the fairness of invitation to seminars;
• To ensure our training aerodromes meet the requirements of the ever-changing training system and network.

Mentoring
It’ll be no surprise to anyone that ATC Training has a much greater demand for mentoring than we can supply. We are putting in a lot of time to make mentoring more efficient alongside the day-to-day training of students, but we can always benefit from more people volunteering within the division. We are short of S2+ rated mentors and especially short of S3+ rated mentors. 

It would be easy to say this to ‘market’ mentoring but mentoring is genuinely one of my favourite things to do on the network - I’d encourage anyone to give it a try. As a mentor you can both help to mould the next generation of VATUK controllers but also have great fun as you go. There is no minimum time requirement and a quick and simple induction process which normally contains little more than completing your first couple of sessions with a member of staff or experienced mentor alongside to assist you. 

Any questions? You can get in touch with us via the VATSIM UK helpdesk with help topic ‘ATC Training’. Any new or returning mentors who are interested in getting started, please let us know by opening a ticket on the helpdesk.

Finally I’d like to thank all the mentors and staff that continue to give up their time to ATC Training. The network would not exist without you!

Thanks,
Adam